It’s truly been a season unlike any other, even with some sense of normalcy coming off an NBA Finals where LeBron James and the Los Angeles Lakers won yet another championship. We’ve had one team, the Washington Wizards, get wiped off the map for almost two weeks, and there will likely be more where that came from as the league continues to play during the COVID pandemic.
In spite of the troubles we live through on a daily basis, there have been some phenomenal performances and the NBA MVP race is starting to round into form as outliers drop and the cream of the crop rise.
NBA MVP Race Player Rankings: Week 4
Before we get started, let’s go over our ground rules from way back in Week 1:
"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."
Last week we dealt with the fallout of multiple teams missing games, and the Wizards missing nearly two weeks. Now the Wizards are back and the Memphis Grizzlies are going through the same thing with six postponements and they won’t be back in action until Saturday at the earliest.
It’s rough for the Grizzlies, and they almost certainly won’t be the last team to endure this.
At any rate, we have some MVP candidates (or at least great players having great seasons) to rank, so let’s get to it and start with our snubs. These players are knocking on the door of the top 10, just waiting to get into the mix.
The period ranked includes all games played since the afternoon of January 20th.