Durant: Welcome to the list of MVP favorites

Kevin Durant, who dropped 43 points on the Hornets on Wednesday, has been shooting the lights out since December. (Layne Murdoch/NBAE via Getty Images)

At the midseason point, SI.com’s NBA writers made picks for the major awards, and not one of us included Kevin Durant on the five-man MVP ballot.

That would change today, I suspect, because Durant is scoring at ridiculous rates again, and, more important, he and Russell Westbrook have the Thunder suddenly among the league’s top five or six offenses. In case you missed it, Durant went off for another 43 points on 14-of-19 shooting in Oklahoma City’s home victory against the Hornets on Wednesday. It was his third 40-point performance in four games and fourth in 11 games. He shot 52 percent in December (including 41 percent from three-point range) and 47 percent in January, and last season’s MVP runner-up is off to a red-hot start in February.

The argument against Durant as a legitimate MVP candidate has become increasingly isolated to the first 12 to 15 games of the season, when his shooting was hovering around 40 percent (the Antoine Walker line) and he couldn’t hit anything from deep. It was during those games that Westbrook thrust himself into the MVP discussion by routinely putting up 25-8-8 lines and keeping the Thunder’s offense afloat with a pile of free-throw attempts as Durant tossed up bricks.

Oklahoma City during that time looked like a mediocre team on both ends — a team just as likely to make the lottery as to make the playoffs, at least judging by its scoring margin. The Thunder, who now have the West’s fourth-best record, are still mediocre on defense, and Durant is part of that problem — along with several other core members of the rotation, as most of their key units have defended poorly.

But the offense has jumped from mediocre to elite, and that rise has coincided with Durant’s increased scoring efficiency. After that wretched start, Durant’s shooting percentages have reached their career norms. He’s made at least half his shots in 14 of Oklahoma City’s last 25 games, and he hit 40.4 percent of his threes (55-of-136) in that span. The free throws will always be there, and though Durant isn’t close to being a top-flight passer or off-the-dribble creator for others, he’s working at it, and he manages to avoid turnovers in the meantime. And the attention he draws on curls, in the post and elsewhere creates scoring chances for the Thunder’s active big men — KD’s mooches, as it were.

The fact that Oklahoma City has tied the Rockets for fifth in points per possession is pretty surprising considering how poorly the Thunder started the season and how little help Durant and Westbrook have gotten from their teammates. The names are getting bigger in Oklahoma City, but the games are not — at least not by much. James Harden looks a lot like the unreliable scoring option he was last season, which isn’t necessarily shocking because he’s only 21. Jeff Green’s development on both ends has stalled out, Thabo Sefolosha is basically a non-entity on offense, Nick Collison isn’t a scorer and Nenad Krstic is often absent from the crunch-time rotation.

Only Serge Ibaka has really improved offensively among the Thunder’s role players, but his minutes have been unpredictable lately, and he gets much of his offense by wisely using the space Durant’s presence creates.

This is really a shallow offensive team, and yet it ranks above the Celtics, Knicks, and Suns in points per possession — and just a tick below the star-studded Heat. The bulk of the credit — nearly all of it, really — goes to Westbrook and Durant

So would Durant crack my top five in the MVP race now? That midseason list, in order, went like this: Dwight Howard, Chris Paul, Dirk Nowitzki, Derrick Rose, LeBron James.

All of those guys, save Nowitzki, who missed nine games with a knee injury, have played the full season without the sort of prolonged slump Durant experienced early. Paul has excelled with a supporting cast most personnel guys would rank below the Thunder’s, and Howard has carried Orlando on both ends — particularly on defense, where he is surrounded by average (at best) defenders. The argument that Rose has had little help will lose some validity every day Carlos Boozer and his 20-10 line stay in the lineup, but Rose, despite his efficiency issues, has been the lone dependable scorer and creator in Chicago for half of the season.

LeBron remains the finest player on earth. And we haven’t even mentioned Amar’e Stoudemire or Dwyane Wade or Kobe Bryant.

But Durant, now, is right there with all of these guys, and if he keeps playing like this, it’s going to be very hard to keep him out of the top five.