In mid-February, the second of ESPN’s three NBA most valuable player straw polls showed Oklahoma City Thunder guard Shai Gilgeous-Alexander with a comfortable — if not ironclad — lead over Denver Nuggets center Nikola Jokic. Six weeks later, the race is virtually unchanged. If the results from our final straw poll are accurate — for each of the past five seasons, they have been — Gilgeous-Alexander will claim his first MVP award. And in a poll that mirrors the league’s official voting and was conducted over a 24-hour period Sunday and Monday, Gilgeous-Alexander claimed 77 of 100 first-place votes.