 What's the word y'all? I think we can all agree that the NBA is better when Paul George's Hooper Man first game back this December and he looked amazing. You would not have thought that bro has missed almost four months of basketball. And him, Lou Canard, Isaiah Hartenstein, Reggie Jackson and the comeback kid, Tawralu put together another one against the Utah Jazz, 25 points. Jazz fans, I'm sorry you had to go through it again. I know it's PTSD, flashbacks. Sorry I had to be you. And I'm already thinking about what the off season might look like for the Utah Jazz. I'm drawing up my own potential trades y'all. I'm trying to figure out who's getting moved if you had to split the two up or the three up or the seven up, whoever. Jazz fans, I'm sorry. And right now you are at the six seed and two games above the play in. Anything can happen and you are skinning it. I'm sorry. I'm sorry we had to go through that. I do want to go through the MVP race. I know it is something we've talked about extensively for some time, but I have to do it again because today was actually a big day for the MVP race. First one is this morning ESPN and Tim Bontes put together this article that we're going to talk about. Basically he polled a bunch of people in the NBA media world to figure out where's your head at? With two weeks left for the NBA season and the results are shocking. See that's how you get people to stay here even though it was like the most talked about thing on Twitter and Reddit yesterday. And then the second thing we had two of the top three MVP candidates going against each other. Yannis versus Jordan Limbete. It wasn't on national TV because the NBA refused to flex some of these games. But it was a banger of a game and Joe Well and Yannis both performed well. But Yannis had the 40 piece and Yannis had the game winning block and has got people talking and we're going to talk about that. But first, can I talk about part one of my announcement? Today is the day. Quick, let's talk about the enjoy basketball brand, man. It's something I've preached on this channel and across all my platforms for some time because by nature, sports is a dialogue based thing. You're going to have this agreement slash arguments about things. But I feel like things have been taken to the extreme recently. We're like we have fans out there or people that call themselves fans that don't really enjoy the game of basketball at its core. And this thing that we're building this brand that we're building are for the fans that just love the game of basketball. So we're launching in a couple different phases, y'all. The first phase, the thing that we are now to today that is in the top of the description is the newsletter. What I figured out is that majority of people don't have the time to digest the game of the NBA as much as I do because you got full time jobs, you got to go to class, you got all these other things so you might miss games on occasions. And when part of the enjoy basketball newsletter, we picked some of the most dedicated slash best writers that were in the community and we gave them a job to write about the things that you might have missed from the previous nights of basketball. Some of y'all might not know this, but I got my start in writing. I know it's weird to say a guy with dyslexia got to start writing, but it's facts. I got my start in writing and now I'm kind of back to my roots and it's something that I'm super passionate about. We actually started working on the process of this like six months ago. And we finally launched, I know it's a weird time because the playoffs are about to start and it's like, what are you gonna talk about after the playoffs? Don't worry about it. Hit that link in the description, man. Go subscribe to the enjoy basketball newsletter. Phase number two is like our merch. Phase number three, we're not even talking about this yet but just hop on the train, man. We even got a community on Twitter. So join that community. And I will be plugging that damn near daily because I wanna see as many of y'all subscribe. You know, you can subscribe and then if a week from now is like nacho vibe, that's cool, I'll subscribe. But anyway, let's talk about these things. ESPN releases their newest NBA MVP voting results. And as we go down, we go down further. You got a lot of words to Mr. Bond tips and I ain't mad at you, go ahead, get your count up. But here are the results. As of today, the people that were polled on ESPN have Yolkich as the winner of the MVP award right now. And actually, he overtook Joel and B because a couple of weeks ago when he asked the same questions to the same people, Joel and B was number one, but Yolkich actually has a decent lead. He has 62, 62 first place votes, 31 second. He's got three fifth place votes. You can argue him being a one, two, three, but number five, you got him at number five, you bug him. So Joel and B to second and Yanis is third and after that, it doesn't really matter. John Moran being number four for surprising to me over like Tatum, Donchich, Booker and some other people. But right now, according to a decent amount of people that actually have votes, Yolkich is the MVP. Now, as you can imagine when we have an MVP race, this close, this Ruffles and Feathers in the NBA community, man. This Ruffles and Feathers in the NBA community actually saw a couple of tweets. And this is a tweet from Jew Hanlon. First of all, he is like one of Joel and B's biggest backers. He's one of his trainers and everything. So of course he's gonna have Joel and B's back, but this is one of his tweets. And even if you eliminate his first sentence, which is very anti-Yolkich, you can look at some statistics, but as Holtzwee says, since the last straw poll, the nuggets have statistically, which is all the analytic geeks care about, which is objectively not true. I can say, I'm not saying this for sure, but I can say Yolkich is the MVP without thinking about super advanced analytics. That's not all the Yolkich backers think about. But anyway, the nuggets have been better with Yolkich off the floor. Didn't he give some statistics? Net rating being a minus 3.4 in differential. And Joel and B has been significantly better. The 76 have been significantly better with Joel and B on the floor since this last poll. So he got everybody asking, or not everybody, but he's got a genre of subculture of people asking, how the hell did Yolkich take over Joel and B when Joel and B has been better than Yolkich in that time period if you lose on and off as you're whatever. And you know what? I like this and I hate it at the exact same time. I like that we have three candidates that like, if you told me this player was your MVP of the top three, if you go any more deep into the top three, I can't have a conversation with you. But if you go any of the top three, I cannot say you're wrong. And one thing that me and my guys have came to the realization of over the last couple of years, I can't knock one of the other dudes to put my guy up, that's how good of a season all of these three guys are having. So I talked about this about a week ago on one of my videos where I'm taking these things very, very seriously. I'm trying to figure out who is my MVP slash all the other things. And this is my criteria that I have for MVP. Again, it's different for everybody. It's definitely different for everybody. And these things will be weighted differently for me. But here's my list of six different things that I'm gonna take into consideration. Some of them might be 5% of my mind. Some of them might be 50% of my mind. But the first was the counting stats. This is the raw numbers. How many points, assists, rebounds, all of the raw shit, stuff. Number two is advanced stats. Number three is the narrative. Because as much as you hate a narrative does play a part in the MVP. And honestly, I think it should to an extent. I'm not saying it should be the most impactful thing we're giving your MVP. But it should matter that for the first 60-something games in a season, 50-something games in a season, Joellen B's second best player was Tobias Harris. You know what I'm saying? It should matter that Yoke is in the different nuggets I'm missing two max players. And yet here they are still in the playoffs. It should matter that Yonis' role in the defensive side of the ball had to change dramatically than what he anticipated. Because Brooke Lopez played one game in a season that missed majority of after. Narrative should matter to an extent. Not saying it's 90%, not saying it's 50%. I'm not even saying it's 10%. But it should matter. The next one is team success. I think that's pretty obvious. You're very rare. You're gonna find an MVP candidate that's winning 50% of his games. Even though I looked it up, Bob Pettit won an MVP award when his team was 33 and 39. And then I had to go deeper into that. That's because back in the day, the players voted on who the MVP was and then the media voted on all NBA. So even though Bob Pettit was on the team that was below 500, his peers said, hey, he's our best player in our league. So we gotta give him the award. He might be playing with a bunch of plumbers, but we know that Bob Pettit is a guy. The next one is moments. Without Googling, without going on YouTube, how many moments do I remember about this player season? It's a small percentage, but I think it matters in my personal case. And then the last one, how successful or how good is the team without you? Just looking to the pure form of most valuable player. How valuable are you to your team's success when you're here and when you're not? And this is a tweet from Andy Bailey, a stats guy, I guess it's falling into what Drew Hanlon said, the right into the advanced stat nurse's hands. But it's the top 10 and basketball references MVP tracker sorted by the net rating swing. And even though Yolkets might have a negative point differential since the last straw poll, he'd still dominating in that statistic throughout the season. I used to think it's fascinating because if you look past the percentage of people that are like actually hate the other two candidates because they believe they're guys, right? I think that you can have real good dialogue on who your MVP is and why. I can give you a 10 minute argument for all three of these dudes and it will be stated in fact. And then you have today's game where Yonus had a 40 piece where nobody can guard. And first of all, Doc Rivers, I hate to be a guy that pals on the coach, but Doc Rivers coaching tonight was terrible. The rotations were terrible. I don't even know if Paul Millsap had played games in the last 10, but to ask that man to try to stay in front of Yonus for 10 minutes is ridiculous. And then the Bucks had their big run when the bench was in and even Joe LeBee kind of threw a little shade in this post game interview saying, hey, I did what I could when I was in the court. Saying, hey, he held me out for way too long. And I think that's definitely true. And then with that, you got some tweets from some NBA Notables for sure. Some NBA Notables had some things to say. I don't get the set of Nick Wright's show. Are these guys in the same room? I am so confused. I think they're in the same room, but this border makes it seem like they're not. I'm so, so very confused. Anyway, Nick Wright tweeted this. I've argued for Luca. God knows many folks have argued for Jokers. Vegas says it's a bead. Maybe we're all overthinking this and we should give the MVP to the clear and obvious best player who's also the reigning finals MVP. Yonus, come get your award. Obviously people are claiming recency bias, especially since he just put up a 40 piece, 27 seconds before Nick Wright had sent on his tweet. But it's interesting. I don't even know why I showed y'all that tweet. I'm being honest with you. That guy has been a very notorious, anti-Yokic guy for the past couple of seasons. So maybe that was a bad tweet to showcase. But Bill Simmons, who actually is a voter, said this in his podcast, if the nuggets fall to a playing team, that's it for me. I can't vote you for MVP. Might still vote him first team on NBA. But if he falls to the playing, that he won't vote him for MVP. And in this podcast, he was definitely saying that if Yokic stays in the playoffs to guaranteed slot in the playoffs, Yokic is his MVP. And I think the likelihood of Yokic falling out of the playoffs is not that high. I know it's only a couple of games, like difference between them and the 70, but it also is just a couple of games left for the season. I just think that the Minnesota Timbers have to really turn it up and the different nuggets would have to really fall for that to happen. I guess it's a possibility. It's not a random possibility, but it seems unlikely, especially with the Utah Jazz now, now skidding like they are. So the MVP race is still up in the air, man. I still have not made my complete decision. I would say, as of right now without, like I said, going through all of this, my six criterias and putting values to them, I think that Yokic is still my MVP at this exact moment. But again, things can change before we get to the KOT Fur Q awards show. I, again, I don't talk about the Lakers often on the show just cause I feel like you're gonna turn on your TV everywhere and they're gonna be talking about the Lakers. It's just the way of the big markets and having LeBron, Russell Rustberg and Anthony Davis on the roster. People aren't gonna talk about them. And I just wanted this to be a place where you can probably escape the overbearing talks about the Los Angeles Lakers. But today they ended up losing to the Dallas Mavericks. Of course, I know Anthony Davis and LeBron, it was out with an ankle sprain. And just like that, they are now on the outside looking in of the play-in because they don't have the tiebreaker between them and the spurs. And there is a real possibility that this stays. And it was just a report that Anthony Davis might come back next week so that could potentially save them. And we don't know exactly what's going on with LeBron's ankle, but the screenshot that I saw of his ankle being on the floor, don't look too great, man. Does not look too great. But what did happen today is that the Laker social media team used a picture of Russell Westbrook on their losing graphic. It is the first time they've done that this entire season. I just think it's interesting. People saw that tweet of me or by me and thought that like, I was trying to uncover this crazy Illuminati thing or this crazy narrative to be anti-LeBron. Bro, I just thought it was funny. That ass, I just thought it was funny. And it's funny how people use that to go to their own personal narratives. Somebody, and I'm not gonna say no names, they have a radio show, use my tweet and use it as dead ass anti-LeBron in a LeBron versus Michael Jordan debate. I'm like, yo, y'all have steered too far away from the original intention. It was really just, isn't that funny that the Lakers do that? That was the only intention. We can't even say, Michael Jordan didn't have no social media team when he hooped, bro. Who Michael Jordan could have been on the set. And honestly, I would go out on the limb before we wrap up this episode. Again, subscribe to the enjoy basketball newsletter. I will be writing there too. I don't know if I mentioned that earlier. I will be writing there too. I don't even think it's LeBron. You think LeBron is gonna walk to the social media team and tell them, don't use my face on the losing graphic. You think that's the, I think the LA in general, the Lakers in general, just don't like to have their star players as the face of a loss. I don't think that was a LeBron thing because it wasn't just LeBron. Before today, it was Russell Esper too. And they haven't used Anthony Davis at all. So I don't think it was like, LeBron hates to be the center of a loss. I just think that the Lakers just don't wanna showcase their stars in that way. You know what I'm saying? And somebody went deeper than I did. Since LeBron has been a Laker, they've only used his face on the losing graphic one time. And that's about three years. I just think it's interesting and fun. That's it, man. That's all.