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Tim Bontemps
In mid-February, the second of ESPN’s three NBA most valuable player straw polls showed Oklahoma City Thunder guard Shai Gilgeous-Alexander with a comfortable — if not ironclad — lead over Denver Nuggets center Nikola Jokic.
Six weeks later, the race is virtually unchanged.
If the results from our final straw poll are accurate — for each of the past five seasons, they have been — Gilgeous-Alexander will claim his first MVP award. And in a poll that mirrors the league’s official voting and was conducted over a 24-hour period Sunday and Monday, Gilgeous-Alexander claimed 77 of 100 first-place votes.
He finished second on the remaining 23 ballots for 931 total points, while Jokic finished with 769. After the two stars received all but one first- and second-place vote in the second round of polling back in February, this edition was a clean sweep — something that hadn’t happened across the 19 previous straw polls conducted since the start of the 2016-17 season.
That dominance atop the ballot goes hand-in-hand with what both players have shown on the court.
Gilgeous-Alexander is on pace to win his first scoring title at 32.9 points per game for a Thunder team that enters Wednesday night’s game against the Detroit Pistons (9:30 p.m. ET, ESPN) with a 63-12 record. OKC needs to win out to join the 1995-96 Chicago Bulls and the 2015-16 Golden State Warriors as the only teams in NBA history to win 70 or more games in a regular season.
Jokic, meanwhile, is attempting to make history by becoming the third player to win four MVPs in a five-year span, joining LeBron James in 2008-12 and Bill Russell in 1961-65.
Despite Gilgeous-Alexander’s lead, Jokic is presenting perhaps his best MVP case.
