How Jayson Tatum’s recent tear has affected his MVP chances

While Tatum has upped his play in January after a relatively quiet December for his standards, his hot stretch actually dates back to the end of the Celtics’ West Coast trip just prior to Christmas. Since he scored 30 points in 30 minutes of play against the Clippers on Dec. 23, Tatum has scored 28.8 points per game on 48.9 percent shooting and 46.3 percent shooting, averaging 7.3 rebounds, five assists, and 1.1 steals per game over his last 10 contests.

The averages from both of those stretches include Tatum and the Celtics’ lousy performance against the Bucks on Thursday, where he scored just seven points in 15 minutes of play as he didn’t play in the second half of the blowout loss. If you removed that obvious outlier, Tatum’s scored 31.2 points per game on 49.4 percent shooting and 45.7 percent from 3-point range since the blowout win over the Clippers, adding eight rebounds, 5.2 assists, and 1.2 steals per game.

All of that has helped Tatum boost his season averages to 27.4 points and 8.3 rebounds per game with a 61.3 true shooting percentage. Tatum’s hot play is almost certainly the top reason why Boston remains ahead of the pack with the league’s best record after its dispatching of Houston on Saturday night, sitting at 30-9 as the season reaches the halfway mark.

Despite all of that, though, Tatum’s recent ascension hasn’t placed him among the frontrunners to win the Most Valuable Player Award. As of Sunday, Tatum holds the sixth-best odds to win the award on DraftKings Sportsbook (+2500), trailing Nikola Jokic (+170), Shai Gilgeous-Alexander (+250), Luka Doncic (+500), Joel Embiid (+700), and Giannis Antetokounmpo (+1000).

But as Tatum is still notably behind the top five, his odds have improved over the last 10 days. He was +3100 to win the award on Jan. 4 and +2975 to win the award on Jan. 11, according to Sports Betting Dime.

For those who are hoping for Tatum to be the first Celtics player to win the award since Larry Bird in 1986 (or if you wagered on it), there’s some recent precedent of players climbing their way up the odds boards in the last few months of the season to win MVP.

Around this time last season, Embiid had the fifth-best odds to win MVP, holding +1560 odds on Jan. 9, 2023, per Sports Betting Dime. A couple weeks prior to that, Embiid was in 10th place in ESPN’s first MVP straw poll (an informal survey conducted among nearly all of the award’s voters) of the 2022-23 season (which Tatum led) before climbing up the board to win his first MVP. Tatum was voted sixth in this year’s first straw poll in late December.

Around this time two years ago, Nikola Jokic held the fourth-best odds to win MVP. But his odds were a bit longer considering his spot, holding +1400 odds to win the award on Jan. 12, 2022, according to Sports Betting Dime.

Similar to Jokic’s second MVP-winning campaign, Tatum might need some of the competition around him to fall off a bit in order to bolster his odds. Injuries to Steph Curry and Kevin Durant, who were the two favorites to win the award at this time in the 2021-22 season, helped open the door for Jokic to repeat despite his team’s sixth-place finish in the Western Conference, for instance.

In a similar vein, Tatum’s MVP odds could strengthen because at least one of the five frontrunners misses enough action. Embiid has already missed 10 of the 76ers’ 37 games this season, meaning he can only miss up to seven more games before being ruled ineligible to win any of the major awards. None of the other MVP contenders have the same eligibility issues at the moment, with Jokic, Gilgeous-Alexander, and Antetokounmpo missing very few games among them while Doncic has missed six games.

What could help Tatum is the Celtics’ record. If Boston remains on its league-best 63-win pace, history would say Tatum should be among the few frontrunners to win the award. The leading scorer on the team with the best record in the league in the regular season has finished in the top three in MVP voting in six of the last 10 seasons, with that player winning the award five times.

But, ultimately, Tatum’s play will almost likely dictate whether he has a legitimate shot at winning MVP or not. Ever since his first All-Star nod in the 2019-20 season, Tatum has typically saved his best basketball for the end of the regular season. He’s averaged 28.3 points per game following the All-Star Game in each of the last four seasons with his scoring average increasing by at least a few points following the break in three of the last four years.

So, Tatum’s work to win MVP is cut out for him, but it doesn’t seem out of the realm of possibility that he could climb up to the odds board by season’s end.