Big weekend in New York, as online gambling begins Saturday in the Empire State and Knicks fans bask in the glow of the ‘Bockers’ big victory over Boston last night on a last-second banked-in 3-pointer by R.J. Barrett. Kyrie Irving is back…sort of…and the Nets will have a pair of home games (without Kyrie) if the snowplows can get their job done in Kings County.

But it is a bigger weekend in Chicago, and not only because there is an epic battle going on between the teachers’ union and the administration of Mayor Lori Lightfoot as the Bears’ season is coming to a merciful end. Because they may have a legit championship contender in the Bulls for the first time since Michael Jordan was playing.

Elsewhere around America, there is a deep freeze just about everywhere.

And that extends to San Francisco, where Steph Curry sat out last night with a left quad injury after playing a pair of clunkers in which he missed 17 of 19 3-pointers. He remains a prohibitive favorite for MVP, but perhaps it is time to take another look at that category.

The weekend begins with the Bulls sitting in first place in the Eastern Conference. Their best player, DeMar DeRozan, hit a pair of game-winning buzzer-beaters this week, and he is sitting at +2800 to win the MVP award. He is averaging one-tenth of a point more than Curry in the scoring race, is making a career-high 36.2 percent of his 3-pointers and will be going up against the Wizards and Mavericks this weekend as Chicago tries to extend its winning streak to 10 games.

This is the point in this column where you start scratching your head and saying: “He’s 28-1 for MVP?”

Well, yes. And you can safely wager anything you want that DeRozan’s odds are going to drop precipitously if the Bulls win those next two games, Curry remains sidelined, and Kevin Durant and his teammates not named Kyrie cannot get the job done at home tonight against the Milwaukee Bucks.

Giannis Antetokounmpo (+750) and Nikola Jokic (+1600) are the only two other players ahead of DeRozan in the MVP futures market, and neither of them is sitting in first place in the standings the way DeRozan is. So perhaps it is time to consider whether Curry and Durant were merely the flavors of the season’s first half, and DeRozan is the guy to wager on while the odds are still high.

DeRozan has played in 32 of the Bulls’ 35 games and has scored at least 17 in each of those appearances. He has not had a single dud, something that Curry (25 combined points on 8-for-41 shooting in his last two games) cannot say. Durant is a more appealing candidate at the moment for a few reasons, including being the league’s only 30-point scorer, but he still must look northward in the standings to see the Bulls, who have gone 2-0 against the Nets this season and will see them again next Wednesday in a nationally televised ESPN game from Chicago that should include Irving (he is only permitted to play in road games under current New York pandemic rules).

The pandemic and the worldwide political climate can both be blessings for gamblers because they are such enormous distractions. If you fall down the Dr. Anthony Fauci sinkhole, then you lose sight of the fact that sports are a national diversion, and legalized sports gambling provides economic opportunities that simply did not exist back during the first two years of the Trump Administration.

Right now, the guy getting most of the props for Chicago’s success is coach Billy Donovan, who is the +400 third choice (behind Steve Kerr of Golden State and Monty Williams of Phoenix) for Coach of the Year. The Bulls do not have a player among the Rookie of the Year candidates, do not have a serious candidate when it comes to Most Improved Player (Alex Caruso is +15000 and Zach LaVine is +20000), the Sixth Man Award (Caruso, currently injured, is +5000) and Defensive Player of the Year.

But remember: The season is only halfway over. Things that look like locks in the first week of January often turn out to have been absurd propositions by the time the spring thaw is over and playoff time arrives. The tortuous thing about playing the futures markets is the amount of time you have to wait for your payoff, but it you think of it the same way you think about building up your 401-K or your pension account or your child’s college savings account, the mindset changes. They say good things come to those who wait, and perhaps DeRozan is worth that wait.

If you think back to what was happening at this point on January 7 a year ago (aside from the fallout over the January 6 events in Washington D.C.), pretty much everyone believed that Joel Embiid would be the MVP, the Bucks’ championship drought would now be in its 51st year and we would all be laughing at how the pandemic turned us all into germaphobes before we defeated it.

Well, let’s just say that we have all learned to live our lives one hour and one day at a time, to hope for the best and expect the worst. We have all made it this far, and we can all celebrate in June when the MVP vote totals are released and we all had money on the winner.

That is not to say that DeRozan is going to be the winner, but his odds are far too high this particular Friday.

If you are so inclined, grab’ em while they are good. Because if the Bulls finish in first and somehow manage to sweep the Nets (there is no fourth game between the teams) and have some success against the Milwaukee Bucks (they teams have not yet played), you will remember how bleak things seemed in early January when your crystal ball turned out to have been working just fine.