There are plenty of labels attached to Boston Celtics forward Jayson Tatum.
NBA champion. NBA All-Star. All-NBA selection. Olympic gold medalist. NBA2K cover athlete. The one missing for Tatum, though? NBA MVP.
Tatum seemed to take a step closer to the coveted individual hardware this year thanks to an early season tear. But after cooling off, it’s clear Tatum still has to leapfrog a few of the NBA’s elites to get his hands on the award.
ESPN released Friday its first MVP straw poll, which had 100 media members participate to get an idea of where things stood in regard to the MVP race. The voting mimicked the actual process for the award.
Tatum was slotted a distant fourth behind top vote-getter Nikola Jokic (827 points) along with Shai Gilgeous-Alexander (678) and Giannis Antetokounmpo (643). Tatum (267) didn’t receive any first-place votes and only three second-place votes.
Tatum is averaging 28.3 points on the season — up over a point from last season but down nearly two points from the 2022-23 campaign — while shooting 45.3% from the field and 35.9% from 3-point range. He also recorded 9.0 rebounds and 5.5 assists per game — both would be a career-high.
The 26-year-old superstar finished in the top sixth in MVP voting each of the last three seasons, getting as close as fourth in 2023. And it’s clear he wants to add the elusive award to his trophy case.
“As a kid you set a lot of goals for yourself and I’ve been very fortunate enough to check off a lot of boxes of things that I wanted to accomplish, things that my favorite players accomplished and saying that MVP is important to me is not in any way taking away from the success of our team,” Tatum told reporters in October, per USA Today’s Jeff Zillgitt.
