NBA: How history tells us who will win the 2017-18 NBA MVP

We’re only a few months removed from Russ taking home the NBA MVP for 2017, but we already know enough to predict who will fill out the ballot next season

Death, Taxes, and the NBA MVP.

Few things in life are as predictable as the names of the players who will vie for the league’s highest honor come June.

Great players, unsurprisingly, seem to find themselves in the running for MVP rather often. It is one of the reasons that the six men who have finished highest the most often – Jordan, LeBron, Kareem, Bird, Magic, & Russell – are generally regarded as the best half-dozen to ever play the game. It is also the reason why the result in 2011 was so shocking.

Derrick Rose didn’t come out of nowhere to win the award – he was an All-Star the previous season and won the Rookie of the Year before that – but taking home top honors at the ripe young age of 22 was as close to unprecedented as we’ve seen. Since the media began voting on the award in 1981, it remains the only time a player who never previously received a single vote was named the MVP.

That doesn’t even begin to tell the whole story. In the 37 seasons of media voting, the winner has finished in the previous year’s top seven all but four times. One was Rose. Two more were Steve Nash’s and Charles Barkley’s initial seasons with the Phoenix Suns. The other was Jordan’s first full season back after retirement.

It gets better. In 29 of those 37 seasons, the MVP finished in the top four in the previous year’s voting. 20 times they were in the top 2. Forget coming out of nowhere; the winner is usually staring us directly in the face.