Thinking basketball podcast.

My name is Ben.

Welcome back to another episode.

Today, it is our now annual tradition, Cody.

We're going to discuss who we think is going to win the most valuable player of the NBA in 2025.

And now that this is not the first time I've prepared for this, I'm realizing this is a very interesting podcast because we do it in December.

And it kind of is like who we think are the best players going to be in the league.

But it's also kind of like who the best team is in the league, but it's also kind of like

who the best team is going to be, but it's also kind of like the narrative and combining all

these forces to figure out, uh, basically as a conversation driver, like how we think the MVP

race is going to shape out at the end of the season. But there's those key moving parts. You have to figure out

who you really think is legit as a team, how many games they're going to win, who's there as a

player. Now we got these injury things where if you like, Joel Embed, he's out. He just literally

cannot qualify. He can average 50 points a game the rest of the year, not that he looks like he's in

condition to do that, but it does

not matter once you cross that line. So, I mean, I was looking at like Kevin Durant last year.

When we did the show, I had a note that one guy will vote for Kevin Durant just no matter what happens.

I think when we talked through it, he was like, by himself at number nine or number 10, Kevin Durant. And sure enough, if you look at last year's MVP voting, Kevin Durant got one

MVP vote in number nine, but he might not be able to do that this year because he's like

three games away from being disqualified. So, um, yeah, that's what we're doing today. I'm going to

emphasize something that you said.

Just because it's one of those things that if it's lost, people will get angry.

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