The most precious award for any individual in the NBA is the Most Valuable Player’s award. Every player wants to win this award at least once in his NBA career. But as we all know it is very difficult for any player to perform consistently throughout the season and even if you manage to do so the competition is so high that you might not win the award even after a great season. So we will talk about a few players who are in the MVP conversation before the start of a new NBA season.
Stephen Curry
After the Kevin Durant’s injury in the post season, Warriors have shown us what they can do without 2 times final’s MVP. But unfortunately for them, their season ended with another critical injury to Klay Thompson. Klay is expected to return around the all-star break. So this Warriors team has to find a way to win the games without their star player. This is where Stephen Curry can play an important role for them. The 2X MVP and the only unanimous MVP has a full potential to carry this team along with Draymond Green & D’Angelo Russell. When asked about the next season’s load management, Curry replied,”Hell Nah!” which gives us an idea about his mentality going into the next season. And independent of who wins the MVP next season, we can expect Curry to have one of the best season of his career.
LeBron James
You can not complete the MVP conversation without mentioning LeBron James. Even though the previous season was a disappointment for the Lakers, LeBron had a pretty decent season even with the injury he had during the January. For some other players 27.4 PPG, 8.3 APG & 8.5 RPG would have been an excellent season, since we are talking about LeBron here, even at this age we can say that those number were decent and we expect more form him. So if Lakers want to win a championship LeBron must have another MVP caliber season.
Kawhi Leonard
We have already seen the consistency of Kawhi Leonard in the last season where he averaged 26.6 PPG, 3.3 APG and 7.3 RPG. Even-though his stats are surely above the average NBA stats, he was not good enough to enter the MVP conversations. Now that with the duo of Paul George & Kawhi Leonard, the Clippers have the best chance to win the NBA title this season, the only question about Leonard is that can he bring his best during the regular season and win his first ever MVP award?
Giannis Antetokounmpo
The reigning MVP will have much more expectations this season as he carried the Bucks to the best record in the NBA. Giannis was unstoppable in the last season where he averaged 27.7 PPG shooting 57.8% from the field along with 5.9 APG and 12.5 RPG. He dominated the previous season and there was no doubt that he will win his first ever MVP. If he manage to produce the same level of basketball again in the upcoming season, there is no doubt that he will be the league’s MVP again.
James Harden
James Harden had a great season where he averaged 36.1 PPG, 6.6 RPG and 7.5 APG. He became the first player after 1987-88 to average more than 35 PPG in a single season. He is 2nd on the list of consecutive 30+ point games behind Wilt Chamberlain(65 Games) where he scored 30+ points in 32 consecutive games breaking the record of 31 games set by Wilt Chamberlain. But all these stats were not good enough as he failed to win back to back MVP awards.
Other players who are worth mentioning
There are other players who also have potential to be the Most Valuable Player in the upcoming season. I have picked up 5 of them below:
- Anthony Davis
- Paul George
- Kyrie Irving
- Nikola Jokic
- Russell Westbrook
Who do you think will win the Most Valuable Player’s award next season?
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