Shai Gilgeous-Alexander

Preseason question: Is it possible for a back-to-back MVP to be underrated? Despite finishing the regular season with the league’s top individual honor (again) and pushing the Spurs to seven games in the Western finals without Jalen Williams, SGA finds himself at no. 3 on our preseason list. That probably says more about Wemby’s ascension and Nikola Jokic’s long-running rankings supremacy than it does about Shai, but there are some minor concerns percolating over how the proposed officiating crackdown on off-arm push-offs by ball handlers—which might as well be dubbed The Shai—will affect the Thunderer’s midrange mastery. We’ll see. You can quibble with his 3-pointer in the playoffs, or perhaps the compounding effects of his heavy workload, but Gilgeous-Alexander has been dialed in for four years running; it’s hard to see anything short of an injury knocking him down a peg at this point.