ESPN’s Dave McMenamin<\/a> asked Don\u010di\u0107 where he felt he fits in the MVP talk this year, and he provided this response:<\/p>\n“My first focus is obviously championship. I’m not trying to think that much of individual awards…obviously I want it but it’s gonna come with our team winning.”<\/p>\n
The top three candidates for the MVP right now are Denver Nuggets center Nikola Joki\u0107 (who leads the league with a 35.9 PER), Oklahoma City Thunder (and reigning NBA MVP) Shai Gilgeous-Alexander (who leads the league’s best team at 24-2) and Don\u010di\u0107 (who leads the NBA in scoring).<\/p>\n
Don\u010di\u0107’s case is helped by the fact that the Lakers are 18-7 despite missing LeBron James, who missed the first 14 games of the season with sciatica in his right side. The Lakers weathered that storm and still went 10-4 in that stretch.<\/p>\n
Of course, the Lakers still have 57 games left in the season, so there’s a lot of basketball to be played for L.A. (and the rest of the league) before we get a good picture on the MVP race for sure.<\/p>\n
In the meantime, Don\u010di\u0107 and the Lakers are striving toward their goal of winning the championship and hoping to continue their good first half when they visit the Utah Jazz on Thursday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Los Angeles Lakers guard Luka Don\u010di\u0107 has averaged 34.7 points, 8.8 assists and 8.7 rebounds per game this…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":354445,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[434],"tags":[49,48,459,82],"class_list":["post-354444","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nba","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-nba","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/354444","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=354444"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/354444\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/354445"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=354444"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=354444"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=354444"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}