Is LeBron James quietly building another MVP season?

The only player to ever win back-to-back MVP awards with two separate teams is Moses Malone, who won it in 1982 with the Houston Rockets and 1983 with the Philadelphia 76ers. That piece of trivia is relevant because if LeBron James wins the award for the third straight year, he'll become just the second player to win it consecutively with different teams and only the fourth player to win it with more than one team (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Wilt Chamberlain, and Moses Malone are the others). That's right -- after all the conjecture about what was wrong with Miami, after dissecting everything that was off with their 9-8 start, and demanding that their coach be sent on a raft and drifted off to sea, the Heat have righted the ship. They are the owners of the fourth-best record in the NBA, behind only the Boston Celtics, San Antonio Spurs, and Dallas Mavericks, and LeBron James is playing great.

It's something nobody wants to hear, but after watching James' Heat destroy the Lakers on Christmas day, LeBron James -- yes, he of The Decision -- is the odds on favorite to be the Most Valuable Player of the 2010-2011 NBA season.

Of course, most sportswriters would rather give it to anybody else after all the attention he and his team have received -- not to mention the fact that he's already won it, and that the writers who vote for it like to spread it around as much as possible. Hell, they'd rather give to Erick Dampier. And hey, the Heat are 14-1 in games he's played in. Or how about Amare Stoudemire or Manu Ginobili or Rajon Rondo? They're all having great years.

True. But it has to be James. Or at least it will be when it's all said and done.

Let's not lose sight of the one thing LeBron has done right the past six months: play basketball. Even though his points are way down from a year ago, he's still the most statistically diverse player in the game, producing 6.5 rebounds, 7.1 assists and 1.4 steals to go along with 24.7 points a night. He's the only member of the Heat who's brought his A-game since their season-opener against the Celtics, and his biggest "statement games" have all come in the biggest of situations. In his return to Cleveland, James had 38 points, nine assists and five rebounds; on the road against the Knicks, James registered a 32-point, 11-rebound, 10-assist triple-double; and against the two-time defending-champion Lakers, James recorded yet another triple-double while hitting a season-high five three-pointers. Miami won those three games by a combined 66 points. Since starting out 9-8, the Heat have completely held up to scrutiny and have won 14 of their last 15 games.

And like it or not, that makes LeBron James the front-runner to win the MVP award. All the Heat have to do is finish within a game or two of the best record in the NBA, and the writers will have no choice but to hand it to him for a third straight year.

The fact of the matter is that most of the other candidates have little to no staying power. Amare Stoudemire is having an unbelievable season, and has made the New York Knicks a much better team than anyone could have expected. But at the moment, the Knicks are "just" 18-12, good enough for only sixth in the Eastern Conference standings. The MVP will never go to a player whose team doesn't even have home court advantage in the playoffs, and since the Knicks have been feasting on easy opponents and have a much harder schedule the rest of the way, they have very little shot at keeping pace with the Heat. The only way Amare could win it is if Carmelo Anthony got traded to the Knicks mid-season, making them an instant-contender and allowing Stoudemire to reap the rewards -- ala Kobe Bryant in 2008 following the Pau Gasol trade. However, there's no guarantee that that's going to happen, or that even if it did, that it might not happen soon enough for them to have a record nearly as good as the Heat's.

Then there's Rajon Rondo, who was playing out of his mind prior to getting injured. The problem is that the Celtics are so good that they can actually survive without Rondo, and were on a 14-game winning streak prior to losing on Christmas -- even though he had missed half the games. Boston simply has too many quality players for one guy to get singled out as their most valuable, and it's for that reason that they'll probably have four All-Stars this year. That's great for the postseason; not so much for individual awards.

The same can probably be said of Manu Ginobili, who got in the news lately by hitting game-winning shots in back-to-back games. At 25-4, his San Antonio Spurs are the holders of the best record in the NBA, and Ginobili has unquestionably had the best season of anyone on the roster. But like Boston, it'll be hard for the voters to ignore the other great players the Spurs have, such as Tim Duncan, Tony Parker and Richard Jefferson. And although their record is phenomenal, they're far less likely than Miami to sustain it, partly because of their age and partly because Greg Popavich is bound to reduce their minutes towards the end of the season. The same is likely true of the Celtics, who are already flirting with disaster with injuries to Rondo, Kendrick Perkins and both O'Neals.

James, to be fair, is no longer devoid of other scoring options the way he was in Cleveland, and a harder case than ever will be needed to get him the hardware. But we should remember why a lot of us thought that the Heat weren't going to win this year: they have virtually nothing besides James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh. Remove Bosh and James and you have the exoskeleton of an atrocious Heat team that had the worst record in the NBA in 2008 (15-67). For Miami to even be 23-9 is a testament to the Big Three, and should they continue on this pace and inch closer and closer to Boston's record, James will be more responsible for his team's success than the best player on any other contender in the league. And that should be enough to earn him MVP No. 3 -- No. 1 in Miami.