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.

Shai Gilgeous-Alexander is a player you can set your watch to. Despite averaging over 30 points per game in each of the past three seasons, he doesn't get there with gaudy, single-game totals. Instead,