This stretch of January around Martin Luther King Jr. Day is usually peak evaluation time in the NBA front-office world. It’s one of the milestone points where teams will have full-staff pow-wows and talk things out,

Gilgeous-Alexander finished with a career-best 54 points on 17-of-35 shooting, eight rebounds and five assists. He shot 3-of-10 from 3 and went 17-of-18 at the free-throw line.

In mid-December, Denver’s Nikola Jokic had a healthy lead on Gilgeous-Alexander in ESPN’s MVP straw poll, conducted several times over the course of each season by Tim Bontemps.