Knicks Star Already in MVP Contention

Jalen Brunson has played at an MVP level ever since he got to the New York Knicks, and nothing is expected to change as he prepares to enter his fourth season with the club.

The most recent list of NBA MVP betting favorites was revealed heading into August, with Brunson once again considered one of the ten likeliest names to watch for the award.

His former Dallas Mavericks teammate, Luka Doncic, made waves with his trim appearance on the front cover of Men's Health Magazine, spurring many to check how he fit into next year's crop of MVP candidates.

Brunson, for his part, has become a regular on lists like this. After developing from a high-level point guard into a star in his first season with the Knicks, he's finished at or inside the top 10 of MVP voting over the last two years, putting the team right back into the contention conversation as one of the best scorers in the league.

New York has spent the offseason positioning themselves to out-do last year's run to the Eastern Conference Finals, where Brunson got to show some of his eastern rivals why he was named the Clutch Player of the Year. Now that they've reloaded their bench and found a fresh coach in Mike Brown who's more likely to take advantage of all of the tools at his disposal, their odds of winning it all in 2026 are actually higher than Brunson's chances of winning his first MVP.

Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, another guard, won the award a few months ago, just a piece of a historic season that ended with him winning NBA Finals MVP after leading his Oklahoma City Thunder to their first ever championship. Brunson, who statistically hung with SGA as a playoff scorer, looks to do the same in the vastly inferior Eastern Conference with a team that's ready to go.