 What's the word, y'all? I still do not know who I'm giving my MVP award to. And I think that's completely fine. I do want to say I take these things very, very seriously from MVP to coach it a year. I take a lot of time to give my official votes. I mean, I don't have an official vote. My vote doesn't count for anything. I'm just a dude with a YouTube channel. But I take it as serious as if I did have an official vote. Because I made up this dream scenario in my mind that eventually I'll get the notice of Adam Silver and I'll be able to give him my resume and also showcase every single person I voted for over the last couple of seasons. And he can say to himself, okay, you know what he's talking about. So I take it seriously. Because there's some people that got real votes that don't take it seriously. Look, I'm so happy there's public information eventually because there are some people I look at who they vote out to at the history and I'm saying either you don't watch ball or you just don't care. We watch ball and we care. And the MVP award is still up in the air for me. The more I think about it, there are a lot of awards still up in the year. The only one that I say that I feel confident that it's gonna stay the same at the end of the season is Palo Benchero's Rookie of the Year. I do love the progression of Jaylen Williams, but like overall, I think it still is Palo. And you know what? Even my most improved player feels very safe in Larry Market. And even though like Shay Guz, Alexander or some other people have some conversations, I still feel pretty good about Larry and I still feel pretty good about Palo, but like MVP, which is what we're gonna talk about a lot today, DPOY, Six-Manded Year, even Coach of the Year is still up in the air. And I feel like around this time in previous years, I kind of had an idea which way I was leaning. But with MVP, there are three candidates. We all know them. It's Yanta DeCumpo. It is Joel Labeed. It is Nikoli Okic. And usually around this time, I have an idea where I'm going and I still do not know. It has fluctuated so much throughout the season. And I think that makes it for a good year. So the other day, Joel Labeed hit a game winner in what a 21 point comeback versus the Portland Trailblazers. And I tweeted something along the lines of that this might be my MVP. I got a lot of responses like, oh my God, it's recency by is what do you do? Joel Labeed has been playing his ass off all year long. Even Nikoli Okic's in the same thing with Yanta DeCumpo. So I think individual moments this season could play more of a part than any other season. Because I think it should be a recipe of the eye test, plus some statistics, plus advanced stats, plus team success. I think it's got to be so many different factors. And they are factors that go in Okic's favor and in Veed's favor and in Yanta's favor. At the beginning of the season, I don't remember who I had as my MVP prediction. And let's be real, I'm never right on predictions other than me predicting John Marek was going most improved player a year ago. But I did say in that video, I didn't think that the NBA award voters would give Okic the MVP even if he deserved it because he'd be one of what, three players in history to win three consecutive MVPs. Personally, I don't think that's fair. I don't think the last two years should play any part on who you vote for this year. But I'm seeing something very weird, and this is not from the official voters, but I'm seeing the tides turn on Nikoli Okic over the past week or so. And yeah, in this video, we're talking about the MVP race. I don't want to talk about anything attached to it. I know there's been people on TV talking about the exterior factors of biases and things like that. That's not what this video is about. We strictly talking about the basketball portion because that's what we do on this channel. When I say that things have changed against Nikoli Okic, it's kind of charm because over the course of his career, he's kind of been like someone that we all knew and loved. And I think partially it's because he's a dude that's gonna complain basketball. He not gonna do no interviews. He don't care about no all-star. We just appreciate it how great he was to the game of basketball and how different he played the game compared to other players across the league. I can't say he was the media darling because I think that has a different meaning to it, but I do believe that he didn't get a ton of criticism and I'm not saying that he deserved to, but like in the last week or so, that has changed. If I go to the front print page of NBA Reddit, the most upvoted thing over the past day is a highlight compilation of the Raptors going at Nikoli Okic in the paint. Now partially this is because the different nuggets are now on their biggest loser streak of the season. In the last couple of games, they have it, not just the last couple of games, I guess in the season entirely, they may kind of get a decimated in the paint, but it's been magnified over the last couple of days, especially when you consider the loss against the Spurs. It was like, there's like Zach Hollins. Zach Hollins? You know what I'm saying? Like if I type in Yolkic's name on Reddit and I say in the last week, let's see what type of posts. The Spurs attacking Yolkic on defense. Zach Lowe quote from his recent podcast. Another Zach Lowe quote from a previous podcast, but a lot of it is about Nikoli Yolkic and his lack of defense. But this is not nothing new. We've known Yolkic's not to be an extreme plus defender. I think the best you can say about Yolkic is he might be okay, but that's the furthest it goes, you know what I'm saying? But that's been the case for the Tiber's career. But over the last week or so, there's been a lot of posts and a lot of conversation talking about his lack of defense when it seemed like over the last couple of years, it was nothing that we even cared about. And that might be due to a couple different reasons. The first one being that because this MVP race is so close, we have to start, I don't want to use the word nitpicking, but we have to start pointing out that the inefficiencies in players' games in order to say like, okay, this is my MVP over Yolkic because look at him defensively. Or it might just be as simple as defensively as a unit. This is the worst they've looked in a couple of years. Like just going down to the numbers. They haven't been this porous on the defensive side of the box. Not like they've been the top of the league, but they've always set around nine to 12. And this season, they're all the way down to 19th for the season. And if you look at just the last couple of games where they are on this loser streak, I mean, obviously their defense has been worse than even ever. Yesterday, I guess it's around the Raptors. The Raptors put up so many points and then a single recorder and they have the 26-ring defense in this timeframe. So it's a combination of people trying to use whatever they can in order to determine their MVP. And that might be in some biases because you want Joel Labeed to win it. Do you want Yanis to win it? Or it could be as simple as the team doesn't play defense as good as they used to. And the interior defense is a good reason for that. I mean, I'm still going through these posts. One of the most outvoted things this week is Nikolay Yolkens missing a game winner the same night that Joel Labeed hit one. A bunch of possessions of Nikolay Yolkens versus the Bulls on defense. Another two months ago, I think Yolkens was better than a beat. I think Joel has proven over the last two months he's the better player. So like it is a lot of the bad side of Yolkens conversation. But even without that being said, he is still towards the top of the conversation for me when I'm thinking about my MVP. Every single one of these players have a case and it's undeniable. You might lean one way or another. I'm not trying to convince anybody because I don't even know. But every single one of these players have a case and it's a good case. And almost any other season, these dudes will be the front runner for the MVP award. But because they're fighting with each other, it's like who do we lean towards? This might be the closest MVP race we've seen in a long time. But then again, I say that and this is a strong poll that Tim Bonsams does a couple times a year. This was just in February. Nikolay Yolkens got 77 votes out of 100 for first place. And if I'm not mistaken, the people that he poll are people that actually have votes. So again, anything is changing, everything is changing. But this was about a month ago where Nikolay Yolkens was running away with the award. But if you look at the previous when it was previously asked, Tatum was in first. And Yolkens was in fifth. So things are evolving. Let's use some time to kind of look at these three candidates and try to pull out some plus of why they're in the conversation. And it might help us lean one way or another starting off with Yanis at the Cumpo. Funny enough, efficiency wise, this was a season that's worse than his last. But the impact is something you see on a United basis. I feel like we've grown so accustomed to Yanis doing the things that Yanis has do that it doesn't even become big story. So we don't even see the highlights anymore. We've kind of just grown accustomed to him just being a bully on the court and being amazing. I was just watching them versus Sacramento Kings where he ended up having 40 something points going into the fourth quarter and steering a comeback against one of the best teams in the league, the Sacramento Kings. And I'm just watching and saying like, man, he's the MVP, right? Then I'm watching Nikolay Yolkens game or I watch a Joellen B game. Like, okay, I'm not sure just yet. Yanis is like sometimes and boils down to best player on best team. The Bucks right now are by far the best team in basketball, sitting at 50 and 17 or 19. I think they're the first team that completely clicks a playoff spot and it's happening relatively early in the season. And since he came back from those five games that he missed at the beginning of January, the dude has been on an absolute tear. And then he misses some time, he misses those five games. And then he had another ridiculous streak where he put up 33, 41, 50, 34, 50, 35. And that's not accounting for the 18 rebounds or the 11 assists, the triple double. And, you know, he's just, he's just been ridiculous. And of course they have been the best team in basketball. And even if you just look at the 15 game win streak that they went on, he was averaging 32 points per game, 12 rebounds, five assists, shooting 38% from three in that time on three attempts. And we're talking about elite level defense on top of that. They ain't gotten the advanced numbers because the advanced numbers are skewed Yolkens' way. But like the conversation is there. And I feel like some people have it as a two man race between the two dominant centers. Yannis has become so good that we just kind of thrown him to the side as like we know you're the best player in the world, but we kind of got bored with it because you already got your two, which is something that happens to our history. Like LeBron got his MVP awards and everybody recognized that LeBron was the best player in the league. And a lot of times he was the best player in the league on one of the best teams, but he never was in the bigger overarching conversations because we were, ah, we've seen that before. Let's go give it to somebody that's new, one of the newer faces of basketball when Yannis shouldn't be in this conversation because he is the most dominant player in basketball. Simple as that. One of the reasons why Nikola Yolkens had been over Joe LeB, throughout the course of the season, of course, again, the advanced stats go heavily on Yolkens' way, but also because the nuggets have been so good and being the one seed out west. With their current losing streak right now, the 76ers have a higher win percentage. Does that matter? Maybe when the conversation is this close, maybe that does matter. So the 76ers are 45 and 22, five game streak currently. They play against him nice. So who knows what that's gonna look like. And Joe LeB is leading the league and scoring. Again, he's doing it for the second time. Like, this shouldn't be overlooked. He's a seven foot center with some of the best footwork I have ever seen. He's also giving you good defense and he's leading the league and scoring, but it's deeper than just looking at the points. I mean, the points are dope though. He scored 35 plus points and 23 games so far this year. 23 games, he said, 35 plus. And he also gave us, I know we got the 71 piece from Dame and Don Bimichu, but he also gave us one of the greatest games in history that's kind of looked over now because it was in November when he scored 59.7 blocks, eight assists and 11 rebounds against the Jazz. That's one of the greatest individual games we've ever seen. But since we also saw some 70 pieces, it seems like the third most important game of the year as far as individual stats go. One thing that I like about Joel and Bied's case is out of the three candidates, he has hit the most go ahead and game winning shots this season. And for a guy that is seven foot, you would think a lot of these game winners are in the posts, drop step, slam dunk, nah. It's like, I'm gonna look like a seven foot version of Kobe and I'm gonna do a turnaround fading mid-range jumper and it's gonna be cash. Every single one of these candidates have a really, really good chance of winning or equal chance if you ask me. And having these conversations should be fun. It should be. This is what we've watched the sport for. This is what we want. We want it to be a year where there are so many candidates for individual awards but it seems like the dialogue around it is like, hey, I'm on this island and if you not on this with me, then we gotta fight to the death. I must hate on this player and this player because I think my guy is the guy when that shouldn't be the case. So let me know what you think. I would advise again that we use these last couple of weeks to really determine and not just have your mindset just yet unless, I mean, I can't be mad at you if you're a Bucks fan. If you think, yeah, honestly MVP, you know what I'm saying, that's your guy. But like everybody else on the outside of us being the 27 teams, it's not associated with the award right now. I would just say use these last couple of weeks. Let's see the moments to see the records and all of these before we finally say this is my MVP. I appreciate you watching. Let me know what you think and I'll see y'all tomorrow.