Hello, everybody, and welcome to this week's edition of The Late Sub.

I am your host, Claire Watkins.

It is Wednesday, May 14th.

We are a third into the NWSL season, which means it's time to take a deeper look into my shortlist for the MVP race.

Maybe not way too early, but a little too early.

Let's talk about who I think has stood out. Their pros, their cons,

and who I think if we were pencils down would win MVP for the NWSL right now.

All right. So we are in the point of the NWSL season between kind of eight games and nine games played,

where we are hitting the one third mark, which is crazy to say the first third of the

NWSL season has really flown by. It's crazy how many games get played before it starts to feel

like summertime, despite it being a summer league. So sometimes it's easy to compartmentalize like those spring games and be like,

oh, now the season's starting.

But no, we are a third into the season, which to me feels like a good time to check in on the MVP race.

Individual awards.

We're just going to focus on the big one because I think we're seeing some

really interesting things, a lot of really good play from a variety of interesting players. I think

there are some clear front runners. We're going to break down kind of my short list. If I had to put

five finalists together right now, maybe not a way too early prediction, but more of like a

kind of too early prediction of what we're seeing from these MVP candidates. This is what I have

put together. There's a larger combo to we have about who might emerge in the second third of the

season, final third of the season, how those results are going to impact players. Obviously,

we've seen players kind of hit walls before, not saying that this is going to be,

...