A two-person race where everyone picks their side and digs in, slinging spirited pleas, peppering propaganda and shouting down from an ivory tower at anyone who

In mid-December, Denver’s Nikola Jokic had a healthy lead on Gilgeous-Alexander in ESPN’s MVP straw poll, conducted several times over the course of each season by Tim Bontemps.

This stretch of January around Martin Luther King Jr. Day is usually peak evaluation time in the NBA front-office world. It’s one of the milestone points where teams will have full-staff pow-wows and talk things out,