After Pelican’s Center Demarcus Cousins was declared out for the season, New Orleans was considered out of the playoffs. Of course, that’s when #1 power forward in the league Anthony Davis (the “Unibrow”) decided to drop 53 points against the Suns and average 34.2 points and 13.3 assists over the last ten games, launching himself into MVP talks.

But, of course, it’s not just about the absolutely INSANE stats that 24 year old Davis has been dropping, his Pelicans are currently on a SEVEN game win streak and sit at 5th in a stacked Western Conference, just one win behind the mighty San Antonio Spurs. Davis has never actually won a playoff game, commenting to Rachel Nichols of ESPN, that with Demarcus “We could have gone through the playoffs…We go to the Finals if we went.” And yet, even without the polarizing “Boogie” Cousins on the floor, Davis is willing his team to the playoffs, and maybe the Finals.

Demarcus has been mentioned a lot in this article because it seems that is where a lot of Davis’s motivation comes from. In the Los Angeles All Star Game, where both Davis and Cousins were voted in as starters, Anthony Davis even wore Cousins’s jersey for a majority of the game out of respect for him (Cousins was injured before the All Star Break). This is all significant to Davis’s case for MVP because Davis is mad. He believes he was robbed of a finals thanks to injury, and now he’s on a mission to drag a team that is subpar at best to the NBA Finals.

What better case is there for a Most Valuable Player Award? Maybe if he were to prove the skeptics wrong as well. Davis has the story, he has the stats, he has the standings, and yet there are still doubters. Skip Bayless, who was formerly on the DFW radio station “the Ticket”,  went on the Fox Sports 1 show Undisputed and claimed that- get ready for it- Anthony Davis is the most overrated player in the league… Skip went on national television and told millions of viewers that a player who exploded for a historic 53 points and 17 rebounds is overrated. But Davis isn’t fazed. Through the years he has been in and out of analysts top 10 players lists due to injuries. But this year, (as a 24 year old power forward) Davis is forcing those analysts to see the other side of the argument: a vengeful, 6’10”, basketball juggernaut, with one eyebrow, leading a shorthanded Pelicans team to a top seed in the league.