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

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,

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.