NBA: Top 10 candidates for 2018-19 Most Improved Player award

As the new season approaches, which young players are poised to make the leap? Here are the top 10 candidates for the NBA’s 2018-19 Most Improved Player award.

The NBA’s Most Improved Player award used to be one of the hardest to predict heading into any given season, and to be fair, few saw Victor Oladipo‘s meteoric rise to stardom coming after his tenure with the Oklahoma City Thunder amounted to a failed one-year experiment.

Still, one recurring trend has moved to the forefront when taking a look at recent winners like Oladipo, Giannis Antetokounmpo, CJ McCollum, Jimmy Butler and Goran Dragic: MIP is usually awarded to a player who ascends to NBA stardom, and in the last five cases, that player’s “arrival” is a trustworthy one, with the player typically staying at or near that stratosphere.

It’s impossible to predict what a player’s career will hold after a Most Improved Player-caliber season, of course, but based on the recent rubric for this award, it becomes easier to identify third- or fourth-year players who are most likely to contend for it.

Second-year players and beyond are technically eligible for MIP, but typically, it takes a couple of years for these candidates to make a major statistical leap and establish themselves as stars in this league.

Opportunity and team success are obviously factors in the voting, but it relies mostly on a player making the jump from average or good numbers to proven stardom. Bearing all this in mind, here are the top 10 candidates for the 2018-19 Most Improved Player award.

Honorable Mentions: Lonzo Ball, Tobias Harris, Jayson Tatum, Dennis Smith Jr., Jaylen Brown, Jabari Parker, Terry Rozier, Taurean Waller-Prince, Stanley Johnson, OG Anunoby, T.J. Warren, Jakob Poeltl, John Collins