The NBA title favorites, an epic MVP race, and the top storylines to w

With All-Star Weekend in the Bay now behind us, the NBA-watching world’s attention now turns to the league’s annual sprint to the finish line.

While the break technically ended on Wednesday, with the Hornets upsetting the Lakers in a game rescheduled due to last month’s Los Angeles wildfires, Thursday represents the full-fledged resumption of pleasantries, with more than half of the league taking its first steps on the stretch run to springtime. We’re just over seven weeks away from the end of the 2024-25 NBA regular season, and there’s still plenty to figure out.

Let’s start figuring it out together, highlighting some of the most important things to keep an eye on between now and mid-April, starting with the most important question there is:

So Luka Dončić is really a Laker, huh? That actually happened?

It did — although the fact that L.A. is now 1-2 since adding Dončić to the lineup, with dispiriting losses to the cellar-dwelling Jazz and Hornets and with Luka missing nearly two-thirds of his shots as he shakes off the rust that accumulated while recovering from a calf strain, helps make his arrival seem less like the stuff of mind-boggling, reality-rending science fiction and more like … y’know … a midseason trade that everybody’s going to need some time to get used to.

Yes, it’s basically the loudest and most seismic possible version of that pretty normal thing. But the tectonic activity emanating from it might not actually shake up the title picture in the present tense, which — for now, at least — is actually the most important question there is:

Who’s got the best shot of winning the 2025 NBA championship?

According to multiple projection systems, that’d be the Oklahoma City Thunder, who hit the stretch run at 44-10, with an eight-game cushion atop the Western Conference — and a chance to go down as one of the most dominant regular-season teams we’ve ever seen.

Led by the…