shakespeare wrote:
When you get time, show me how Westbrook was more valuable to this season's OKC team than Harden back in '12 during his 1st year with the Rockets.
Before Harden's arrival, Houston failed to make the playoffs with a core of Dragic, Lowry, Parsons, Courtney Lee, Kevin Martin (all of whom were gone except Parsons when Harden signed). They signed Lin and Omer Asik.
Well Shakes! Thanks for asking!
I think PER has a lot to do with it. Or it least it correlates well to how voting actually goes. Lets take 2012-13 for instance. The top 3 MVP vote getters were LBJ, Durant, Melo, Paul. If you look at their PER, Lebron was 1st, KD was 2nd, Melo was 4th. (Chris Paul was 3rd in PER.. he was 4th in MVP voting). So the top 4 guys in votes were the top 4 guys in PER.
That's not always the case though. Let's move to 13-14.
MVP Votes:
1. Durant (1st in PER)
2. Lebron (2nd in PER)
3. Griffin (11th in PER)
Again, the winner in PER wins the MVP. Griffin was all the way at 11 in MVP voting, but it's not like he got any 1st place votes, 5 of the guys in the top 11 in PER didn't make the playoffs, the remaining 3 guys were Paul (his own teammate), Westbrook (the 1st place guy's teammate) and Steph Curry, who finished 6th in MVP voting. Moreover, lets look at their actual values. KD's PER was 29.9, Lebron's was 29.4, the net was 26.97 for Kevin Love. Obviously a huge gap between the top two and everyone else, and go figure, that race was really Durant vs Lebron the whole way.
Now, things APPEAR to get interesting in 14-15, but a deeper look shows the exact same result!
MVP Votes
1. Steph Curry (3rd in PER)
2. James Harden (5th in PER)
3. Lebron James (8th in PER)
The top two guys in PER were Anthony Davis and Russell Westbrook, neither of them made the playoffs. So Steph Curry was the highest PER who made the playoffs... and he won. The next highest guy in PER was Kevin Durant, who also missed the playoffs and only played 27 games (yet somehow still qualifies for PER). So the next highest eligible guy who made the playoffs was.... James Harden. So again, the top two guys in PER who made the playoffs, led the MVP voting and the guy with the higher PER won. If you're wondering, the 6th guy in PER was Hassan Whiteside, who didn't make the playoffs. The one guy who made the playoffs and got snubbed? Chris Paul with the 7th highest PER. But Lebron is Lebron so he's going to finish high no matter what apparently.
So let's move on to 15-16.
1. Steph Curry (1st in PER)
2. Kawhi Leonard (7th in PER)
3. Lebron James (4th in PER)
Now, this to me is the most fun of the cases. Curry destroyed everyone in PER. 31.56. Durant was next at "only" 28.25. Damn you John Hollinger for developing a statistic that can let boban marjanovic end up 3rd, but I guess you could try to use the Value Added stat instead. I like simple stats though, so i'm sticking with PER. Anyway, back to the story, Kawhi is the outlier of all outliers. His PER was 7th (counting Marjanovic). But lets look at some of this. 2 and 4 were Durant and Westbrook. This hurts because they split an argument of who is more valuable between them, so they end up falling together. Lebron was tied with Westbrook for 4th. But he falls til AFTER Kawhi? Why is this? You can bet your ass it has everything to do with the Spurs winning 67 games and the Cavs winning 57 games. Unfortunately for Lebron, at this point, people knew that Kyrie Irving was really damn good at basketball and they probably thought that team should've won more than 57 games in the east with Irving and Love. They should've. Meanwhile 67 games is a whole lot of wins. Also, 40-1 at home, the greatest home record in the history of the NBA. See, this is my problem with the "Harden's team won more games". That argument only really ever comes into play if the team doesnt just win more games, but wins a ton of games in general. You get bonus points for being the best player on a historically great team. The 2016 Spurs finished tied for the 7th best record in NBA history. The Rockets this year aren't a historically great team, so the record isn't really going to come into play.
I also think people just expect more wins out of Lebron's team considering that he's the best player in the game. The bulls won more than 60+ games in all but one of their championship seasons. 51 wins from lebron's team this year is not impressive. He almost disrespects the regular season award because he doesn't always play hard enough. If you think he does play hard enough, then I ask you why his PER isn't higher than everyone elses and how he only has 60+ win season since he was a hungry lone wolf during his first tour in cleveland.
This brings me to 2016-2017...
NBA PER
1. Russell Westbrook 30.70
2. Durant
3. Kawhi 27.62
4. AD
5. Harden 27.43
6. LBJ 27.11
If Westbrook loses, it would be the first time the winner of PER didnt win the MVP in the last 5 years ( i didnt look before that, but maybe its gone on for longer). Kawhi won more games than Harden AND has a higher PER than Harden. Harden's team doesn't have the sort of "all time great" success to get the jump that Kawhi got in the past (which only got him to 2nd. It still wasn't enough to break the Per winner = MVP winner correlation). Additionally, Lebron's PER is lower than Kawhi and Harden AND his team is worse than Kawhi's and Harden's. So no way he's going to win MVP unless people just think he needs more hype.
With these stats in mind, I'm picking Westbrook for MVP. Kawhi will finish 2nd. Harden will finish 3rd.