For the West guards, the player who obtained the most votes and who will start in back-to-back All-Star games is none other than Oklahoma City Thunder's Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. S

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,