Good afternoon and welcome to Locked on NBA Daily on today's show. We're at the halfway point of the season, so we're handing out our mid-season awards.

She's the leader for MVP, but who else should be on the ballot? Meanwhile, it's shaping up to be another tough year to vote for defensive player of the year and is rookie of the year already decided.

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I'm Wes Goldberg, and today we're talking about our mid-season awards. Then we're going to make our revised finals predictions at the end of the show. We're doing with the help of lockdown's local experts. I have two of the best with me, as always, from the Lockdown Nuggets podcast, senior NBA writer for the Action Network. It's Matt. A lot of drama with Grizzlies overseas. I ripping my memphis shirt from the aBA as well as my hustle hustle hat today try to support for the team

because well it's about to get really really ugly with the java rant situation shout out to

germany and all our viewers over there in uh berlin from the lockdown bulls podcast also a bears

and bulls creator for bleach report it's haze since i don't have much time to like self plug for many people will know, but other than Chicago, I also grew up in Mannheim, Germany. So shout out to everything going over in Germany right now. I remember that, yeah. All right. Let's jump right into it because we have a ton to get to on today's show. We're at the midseason point of the season. So we're going be doing our mid-season awards today. We're going to be handing out awards for MVP, defensive player of the year, six men of the year, rookie of the year, coach of the year, most improved. We're also going to hand out an Emmy for our most entertaining player through the first half of the season. We're also going to make some finals predictions at the end the show but let's start with the big one we'll start with MVP this will uh this is going to be the

only one guys where we're going to make some finals predictions at the end of the show. But let's start with the big one. We'll start with MVP.

This will, this is going to be the only one guys where we're going to do our full five-player ballot. For everything else, we'll just kind of go with our pick through the halfway point of the season. Full disclosure, we are eliminating Victor Web and Yama and Janus because more likely they're not, they're not going to qualify at the end of the season because of the 65 game rule. We are keeping,

however, Nikol Yic for now, because he's only missed eight games. We don't know when he'll come back, not sure how long he's going to be out, but as Matt has pointed out several times, that guy's an Iron Man. When he does come back, probably not going to miss a ton of games after that. So we're going to keep Joker eligible for now. Meanwhile,

it was Shay Gillers-ers Alexander who had a big game in the Thunder's

win over the Spurs last night. Rylan Stiles says it was even more of an MVP statement.

Shea was clearly motivated. He's hitting jumpers in the first quarter and mean mugging on the way

back. He's screaming into the crowd, but also pointing at the spurs, screaming at the spurs directly.

We can't repeat on the show what he said.

This is a family show.

She cleaned it up.

It's a family show.

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