Lakers News: How Latest Anthony Davis Injury Impacts His 2023 MVP Odds

The Lakers big man had been playing at an All-NBA level before his foot ailment.

Los Angeles Lakers All-Star big man Anthony Davis may be on the mend and able to return on the earlier side of his anticipated comeback timeline, but his chances of nabbing certain end-of-year hardware seem to have dipped significantly.

Per BetOnline, Davis has slid off the board as a viable betting option to nab 2023 Most Valuable Player honors.

Davis's Vegas odds for capturing some MVP hardware on the site rose as high as 40-to-1 at the start of the 2022-23 NBA season, fell to 100-to-1 on December, and has plummeted off the board as of today.

This all makes sense, as he appears to already be on pace to miss too many games for the regular season honor. Davis has been healthy for just 25 of the Lakers' 36 games thus far this season, and at minimum will be shelved for the next two weeks of games as he continues to recuperate from a stress injury in his right foot. 

When he was healthy, The Brow was producing at an MVP level, albeit for a lackluster Lakers team. For the 2022-23 season thus far, AD is averaging 27.4 points on 59.4% shooting, 12.1 rebounds, 2.6 assists, 2.1 blocks and 1.3 steals.

LA's middling 15-21 record would probably preclude Davis from actually contending for end-of-year hardware, but then again were he healthy for some of the team's recent losses (the club has gone 3-5 since Davis went down), some of those defeats could have been victories. Generally, for true MVP contention, a team needs to be roughly on track for a 50-win season and though there have been two recent exceptions, both those players (current Lakers point guard Russell Westbrook, who won while leading the 47-35 Oklahoma City Thunder in 2017, and Nikola Jokic, who won his second straight MVP in 2022 on a 48-34 Denver Nuggets team) were playing for clubs that were still significantly above a .500-win season pace.

There is no way Davis would win an MVP on a team with a sub-.500 record, and no there's seemingly no way he'll be healthy enough to even realistically compete for the honor.