NBA MVP Race Player Rankings: Kevin Durant regaining his powers

In our second edition of the NBA MVP Race Player Rankings, let’s see who surges to the top of the board, and how far Kevin Durant’s efforts pushed him.

Over the course of the past week, we’ve had one of the most chaotic weeks not involving a league-wide NBA shutdown in history. Multiple games have been postponed due to COVID infections and contact tracing, a superstar has walked off the job for unknown reasons and indeterminate duration, and that superstar’s team made one of the biggest trades in NBA history.

All in all, in a league that invites and basks in the ridiculous, it’s even been a bit over the top for the NBA.

We’re going into the second week of our NBA MVP Race Player Rankings here at Hoops Habit, so let’s just dive into things. For starters, the ground rules as established in week one:

"This won’t be an exact science as we’re not going to be plugging everybody’s BPM, RPM and PIPM into a calculator and dividing by 36 minutes. It’s going to use healthy amounts of recency bias, popular narrative, team success (or lack thereof) and whatever other elements I choose to incorporate at a given time. It could be messy, chaotic and a bit unpredictable, and it’s certainly going to get flipped on its head every week."

As is tradition, we’ll begin with our three snubs.

NBA Player Power Rankings snubs: On the outside looking in

Jerami Grant – Detroit Pistons

Jerami Grant and the Detroit Pistons were mocked for mutually betting that he was ready for a bigger role and that they were the team to give it to him. It turns out that if the first 11 games of the season are to be believed, Grant and the Pistons knew exactly what they were doing. He’s been spectacular, averaging 24.8 points per game on great efficiency, and this fairly awful team is almost able to play break-even basketball when he’s on the floor. If he keeps this up and the Pistons can string together a couple of surprise wins (easier said than done), we can expect him to slide in with the big boys on this list.

Zach LaVine – Chicago Bulls

Zach LaVine has been an emergent surprise for the Chicago Bulls. In spite of their rough start, they seem to be getting their feet under them over the past week or so. He’s averaging a career-high 27.7 points per game with great efficiency and a high usage rate, so if he can continue to produce at this level don’t be surprised if the Bulls are able to put together a run and maybe even get into the play-in conversation.

Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown – Boston Celtics

We can see Jaylen Brown’s inclusion in the snubs as a correction from last week when he was surely deserving of at least fringe inclusion in this list. Unfortunately, as the Boston Celtics have been a team hit hard by postponements, they haven’t played a game in almost a week and Jayson Tatum is going to have to pay the price as other players move into the top 10. Assuming the Celtics get back in action sometime soon (which is a big assumption, to be fair), expect both of these players to force their way into the top 10.

Now we’ll move to the top 10, and because some of these players were not in these rankings last week, stats will be relative to this past week’s action (including the game of January 7th onward) rather than the season as a whole. Unless otherwise stated, of course.