Ranking the 14 most likely candidates to win the inaugural MVP of the NBA's In-Season Tournament

While some fans were initially confused about the NBA’s In-Season Tournament, the league experiment is working like a charm.

Now that eight teams will advance to the quarterfinals, we have a more clear picture of who might become the first player to win the Most Valuable Player of the NBA Cup. While superstars like Nikola Jokic as well as Joel Embiid and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander were eliminated, other big names still remain in contention.

According to NBA.com, the award will be given “based on the players’ performance in both Group Play and the Knockout Rounds.”

In order to provide us with some context about how everyone fared during seeding games, however, we wanted to provide a trusted catch-all metric that contextualized player performance during group play.

As we mentioned before the season, we asked a basketball data scientist who works for an NBA team to tell us which was the best statistic using just box-score data. This individual recommended that we use Daily RAPM Estimate (DRE) by Kevin Ferrigan.

You can learn more about the metric via Nylon Calculus. But the shortened version is that it’s like Player Efficiency Rating (PER) but weights derived from RAPM (which you can learn more about here) instead of just arbitrary weights.

Attached to each player are their current odds as well as their percentile ranking in regressed DRE per 48 minutes during seeding games of the NBA’s In-Season Tournament.

For those who do not win the MVP, meanwhile, it’s worth noting that the league will also issue All-Tournament honors. Until then, however, this is how the odds are shaping up based on what we have seen so far.

All odds listed below are provided by DraftKings Sportsbook.

RELATED: Here is the official bracket for the first knockout round of the NBA In-Season Tournament