shakespeare wrote:
Agreed. He's one of the purists on this site, including yourself. I didn't have time during the weekend to really analyze his findings, but before this day is done, hopefully I will. As for now, I'll say that until the league leader in PER wins MVP each and every season, it's not all about PER.
Again, I ask the question: If Westbrook averages a triple double every season, does he win MVP every time?
More food for thought when you get caught up, Shakes...
If his team makes the playoffs, he doesn't have anyone on his team to split votes with, and no one has a higher PER than him, sure. But that's not going to be the case every year. The amount of shots westbrook misses will always make his PER beatable. Steph's was higher last year than Westbrook's is now. Lebron's beaten Westrook's 2017 PER on 3 different occasions. Obviously its important to qualify that statement by saying that PER compares a player to the league average for a season, so comparing between seasons isn't really fair (although it is in the sense that PER is therefore adjusted for league pace, trends in officiating, rule changes, etc). I think if someone comes within +/- 1.0 of him and wins significantly more games, then Westbrook wouldn't win it.
You can say that "until the league leader in PER wins MVP each and every season"... but he pretty much has. There will be exceptions to every rule, but looking at the data, I think my findings have a stronger correlation than any other measure someone would think to use. Especially in the super team era. Yes, I know, it gets weaker as you go into the past, but the MVP is voted on by the media. 10 years ago, the media couldn't just go pull PER stats for every player in a few minutes. If i'm on the media in 2017 and I want to unbiasedly try to see who is impacting the game the most, I'm going to look to advanced analytics. The strongest argument you could use against it is to say that you're biasing too heavily toward offense over defense... Well if that's the way you feel, then you really, REALLY can't justify harden over westbrook or kawhi.
I mean, if you just look at the times in the last 10 years when my prediction would've been wrong, it would just be the times when someone was so popular or respected or revered (or the opposite) that people voted with their hearts. All of those things would point to Westbrook. Who plays the hardest? Westbrook. Who is the guy who gets touted for being loyal in an era of disloyalty? Westbrook. Why is Westbrook alone? Because Harden ran away to Houston and Durant ran away to OKC. If I were to be ballsy enough to try to predict social/nonstatistical conditions for PER-upsets in MVP voting, I'd pick this year in FAVOR of westbrook. I.e. if Harden somehow had a better PER, I'd STILL consider picking westbrook.
I think those of you who think Harden and Lebron have a chance at winning this thing are going to be very, very surprised with how lopsided the voting ends up. There's no real way to look at any of the data and end up on Harden or James. And its impossible to play the eye test because these guys play 82 games a year and you couldnt possibly watch all of them. That Tuesday evening game against the Trailblazers is no less important than that Sunday afternoon ABC televised game against the Warriors. You remember one of them. Stats remember all of them.
In Thibs we trust.
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