2025-26 NBA Midseason Awards: MVP, Rookie of the Year and Most Improved Player at the halfway mark

Who has been the MVP of the league at the season’s halfway point? Who’s winning the Rookie of the Year race? With every team hitting the 41-game mark, let’s hand out midseason awards.

(Mallory Bielecki/Yahoo Sports Illustration)

The Midseason MVP is …

Dan Devine: Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Thunder, for many of the same reasons he won last year. Take your pick: the best player on the best team; historically elite individual production that lines up pretty neatly next to Michael Jordan; the driving force behind what profiles as one of the greatest teams of all time; the primary reason OKC has a 5.5-game lead on the rest of the West; the most valuable clutch contributor in the league; first or second in nearly every advanced stat known to NBA nerdkind; and has played 10 more games and about 300 more minutes than Nikola Jokić. It’s a pretty strong damn case.

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Tom Haberstroh: Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. Injuries to the other four major candidates — Nikola Jokić, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Luka Dončić and Victor Wembanyama — have paved the way for the reigning MVP to repeat. I think Cade Cunningham could make a late-season push, but it’s Gilgeous-Alexander’s award to lose. He’s the best player on the best team and has established himself as the game’s top clutch assassin, scoring a league-high 122 points with the score within five points in the final five minutes.

Steve Jones: Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. The debate will rage on down the stretch, but with an injury to Jokić, the Bucks fighting to get into the play-in and the Lakers slipping down the Western Conference standings, it feels like it’s clearly Gilgeous-Alexander. The consistency he’s brought on the offensive end has continued to power the Thunder to the top of the standings. It will be intriguing to see how hard Cunningham, Wembanyama and Jaylen Brown start to knock on the door.

Morten Stig Jensen: Nikola Jokić, Nuggets. Gilgeous-Alexander has played in 10 more games so far, but that advantage isn’t quite enough, in my eyes, to overtake Jokić’s season. That will change, however, should Joker miss a significant portion of games…

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Author : Yahoo Sports Staff

Publish date : 2026-01-20 20:37:00

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