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At the risk of adding yet another take to The Great MVP Debate of 2020-21, it might be worth illustrating the size of the advantage Nikola Jokic’s combination of good fortune and overall durability has conferred upon him.
If the purpose of an award is to drive discussion, the vagueness of the criteria for choosing the NBA’s MVP has to be considered a smashing success. Within the ‘most valuable player’ moniker, the last word is the only one for which there is essentially a universal agreement on the definition. What is meant by either ‘most’ or ‘valuable’ says more about what the voter deems important than about what they voted on. If I was going to indulge in maximal cynicism, I might suggest that the definition chosen tends to be more a result of ad-hoc, post-facto justification for support of a player already preferred. To the extent there is any broad standard that can be ascribed to voters and commentators, it is that the MVP should go to the best player on a contending team who scores the best on a scale combining on-floor impact with a compelling seasonal narrative.
Simple, right?
This isn’t really the space to argue about which player has had the best “story” this season, so rather than attempt to do so, I wanted to discuss the impact component. As with all aspects of the MVP discussion, the degree to which ‘impact’ is meant to indicate per-possession dominance or the sum of overall contribution is left unresolved. There is clearly a bulk production element. Kevin Durant has a reasonable argument for doing the most per-possession over the course of the season. But he’s played in only 24 of Brooklyn’s 58 contests and, as such, is not really in the mainstream discussion.
On the other end of the spectrum, the award is not intended as an iron-man trophy. In recent seasons, Jrue Holiday has been near the top of the league in terms of several well-respected overall impact metrics. He was fifth in the league in the measure of 3-year production I used as part of the Player Tiers Project. Though he had (and continues to have) generally excellent marks in terms of per-minute production, his overall production numbers have been enhanced by playing huge minute-loads on fast-paced teams, and this is likely the first time his name has been brought up even tangentially in MVP conversations.
Still, we should weight at least a little bit more towards total production. Not to the point whereby a player will win the awards merely by dint of playing two or three more games than his nearest competitor, but larger gaps should be significant to overcome. This is the situation in which we find ourselves this year. The two leading candidates, according to Tim Bontemps’ Straw Poll are Jokic and Joel Embiid. Jokic has a commanding lead in terms of support (90-5 in first-place votes), driven largely by having played nearly 750 more minutes than Embiid.
For the record: I was a part of Tim’s ‘jury,’ with my top five as of around two weeks ago being Jokic, Embiid, James Harden, LeBron James and Giannis Anteotkounmpo in that order.
The chart below includes a few production metrics alongside the estimated wins produced by each player according to those metrics.
RAPM and Luck-Adjusted RAPM are courtesy of NBAshotcharts.com. For those not familiar, the luck adjustment is an attempt to control for on/off variance in teammate and opponent shotmaking, particularly from beyond the arc and at the free-throw line. I don’t particularly like using luck adjustments in larger samples, as some of the teammate and opponent shotmaking could be due to the player in question, and adjusting away that impact would be bad! But for a partial season, luck-adjusted ratings are worth considering. EPM or Estimated Plus/Minus is the creation of former Utah Jazz analyst Taylor Snarr and has perfomed well in out of sample validation tests compared to many other leading metrics:
Even in RAPM, where Embiid has a sizable per-possession edge, Jokic’s superior availability suggests he has brought more overall value to the Nuggets than Embiid to the Sixers. The other measures are more favorable to Jokic, some overwhelmingly so, and so the gap is far larger. The season isn’t over, but the chart below illustrates the degree to which Embiid would have to outperform Jokic on each metric to either catch him (top line) or at least “keep it close” by getting within two wins, assuming each player appears in 600 minutes over the rest of the season.
Though Embiid is already perhaps within the margin in terms of RAPM, to catch Jokic over this small slice of a season, the Sixers center would need to outperform his Nuggets counterpart by over three times the per-possession advantage he has experienced over this season. On the other metrics, the gap is even larger. To even get within two total Win Shares, Embiid would have to outperform Jokic by over 1/4 of a win per game. To put that in perspective, the best season according to WS/48 in Basketball Reference’s database was LeBron in 2012-13, when James outplayed the average NBA player by 0.222 WS/48. Embiid would have to surpass that margin — relative to not just an average player, but Jokic — by an additional 25 percent. Ain’t happening.
None of this should be taken as any sort of denigration of Embiid. He’s had a wonderful season, and should consider himself unlucky that he will probably be relegated to All-NBA Second Team by virtue of sharing a position with Jokic. To a degree, he has been unlucky with injuries. Or perhaps more accurately, Jokic has been lucky relative to the MVP field this year in terms of avoiding injuries, at least to himself, if not his teammates. But the MVP in any given season isn’t necessarily the best player in the world. It’s usually the guy for whom everything broke right in terms of health, team quality and his own performance.
Steta sto se Jojo povrijedio, bila bi to jedna od najboljih MVP utrka u zadnje vrijeme.
Ovako nema nikakve utrke, Jokic je MVP.
