The MVP race is exhausting. It's like one of those race car games you watch on a JumboTron where the five cartoon cars are constantly rotating the lead car back and forth around the track.
Only this is real life. It seems remarkably silly that each game feels like a referendum on each candidate's campaign. Russell Westbrook had another triple-double? He's the MVP! Stephen Curry just created 17 Vines en route to a 20-point blowout? He's the MVP! James Harden beat another title contender without Dwight Howard? He's the MVP! James Harden dropped 50 without Dwight Howard? LeBron James looks healthy again? He's the MVP.
As of earlier this week, I had Curry as my MVP front-runner. And I felt pretty good about it. But then I discovered Anthony Davis' hidden haymaker in this debate.
I'm not talking about his gaudy player efficiency rating that currently stands at a league-leading 31.3, an eyebrow hair beneath Wilt Chamberlain's record of 31.7. I'm not referencing the fact that he's averaging 24.6 points, 10.4 rebounds and a league-leading 2.9 blocks on 54.2 percent shooting. And he just turned 22.
That's all great. But forget all that for a moment. Gather around and let me introduce you to a little thing called win probability added. And prepare to be floored by The Brow's résumé.
A new way to look at the MVP race
As crazy as it sounds, Davis' incredible box score stats probably underrate his impact on the New Orleans Pelicans' season. According to Inpredictable.com -- a groundbreaking sports analytics website that tracks how much an NBA player's play-ending actions move the needle of his team's chances of winning -- Davis is the league-leader in win probability added (WPA) with 8.43 wins.
And he's not just outperforming the rest of his peers. They're not even in the same stratosphere as Davis. The next highest player is Kyle Korver adding 5.19 wins to the Atlanta Hawks' bottom line. Davis has generated almost twice as many wins as the next most impactful player.
Let me back up and explain how all this stuff works.
At any given point in a game, each team has a win probability depending on the game state (quarter, clock, margin and possession). If a player makes a basket, he improves the team's win probability. If he misses the shot or turns the ball over, he decreases their odds of winning. Intuitive stuff, right? Michael Beuoy, who runs Inpredictable.com, has written an algorithm that adds up all the credit and debits that a player accumulates during a game to arrive at a summed total of win probability added (WPA). Beuoy then takes a step further and aggregates all of those game totals for the entire season.
To be clear, player WPA only looks at the basic stuff: field goal attempts (made or missed), free throws (made or missed) and turnovers. After that, it adjusts for the game state because the gravity of the situation matters. For example, if a player misses a potential game-tying free throw at the end of the game, it's a much more devastating blow than if he misses a free throw in the opening minute of the game. By pinning it to a game state, WPA offers context to the box score numbers.
Let's take Davis' game earlier this week against the Milwaukee Bucks. Up 83-82 with 1:15 left in the game and the ball, the Pelicans had a 71.9 percent chance of winning according to Beouy's historical database of games in those situations.
At the 1:07 mark, Davis drains a 15-foot jumper to raise the Pelicans' win probability to 83.9 percent -- a 12 percent credit goes to Davis. After a couple more possessions, the Pelicans end up winning the game after a missed Ersan Ilyasova 3-point attempt that cost the Bucks 28.9 percent of win probability. Ilyasova, because he missed the shot, gets dinged for that miss with a debit of 28.9 percent.
Still with me? Add up all of those credits and debits and you get a nice tidy percentage for each player, basically their cut of a team's win or loss.
This season, after adding up all those percentages, it turns out that Davis has a WPA total of plus-8.4, which dwarfs everyone else in the league. Not only that, his plus-8.4 far outpaces prior season leaders at this point in the season. Last season, Kevin Durant led with a plus-6.8 figure in mid-March. He led in 2012-13 as well with a plus-7.34 mark. Davis is lapping the competition this season and last.
Davis' clutch inferno
Davis has made a ton of shots in basically do-or-die situations this season. His biggest shot of the season, by the WPA model, is his skying put-back dunk to put the Pelicans up 84-82 against the Spurs with 0.7 seconds left in the game. With the play, he raised the Pelicans' win probability by 46.3 percent to just about 100 percent. Of course, the Spurs eventually won the game after a freak play tied it up and sent it into overtime. That's so Spurs.
But Davis has been hitting crazy shots like that all season long. He drove for a game-winning layup with six seconds left back in November against the Spurs. Over the weekend against Denver, Davis hit two go-ahead buckets in the final minute of regulation before scoring six of his New Orleans' eight points in overtime. Oh, and he hit that double-clutch, walk-off 30-footer against OKC at the buzzer in early February, prompting his teammate Ryan Anderson to say about Davis, "he's just insane."
Yes, there's a WPA just for big moments. In fact, Davis' WPA in clutch situations (game within five points in final five minutes) is 4.6, meaning he has delivered almost five victories single-handedly in tight situations. The crazy thing? The next-highest is Jimmy Butler at 2.33. In other words, Davis has been twice as clutch as the second-most clutch performer this season. (Coincidentally, Tyreke Evans is the least clutch player this season, registering a minus-2.2 clutch WPA).
Don't trust the WPA figures? Think it's all made up? Believe it. Just take a gander at his box score stats. In clutch situations (game within five points in the final five minutes), the defense locks down and the average player shoots just 40 percent from the floor. But not Davis. He has shot a ridiculous 63.5 percent (33-of-52) from the floor, scoring 93 points in just 104 minutes of action. If we translate it to a per-36-minute scale, Davis is putting up 32.2 points, 12.1 rebounds and 3.1 blocks in crunch time.
His PER in that time? Try 42.9. Among the 62 players this season with at least 100 minutes in clutch situations, Davis reigns supreme. Look at the following chart:
Let's give that 42.9 clutch PER some more context. Not only does it blow away the competition this season, but it's the highest figure among the hundreds of qualified players we've seen in the past five seasons according to the NBA StatsCube database. (It's worth pointing out that LeBron has a 43.0 PER in 80 clutch minutes this season, but it's 80 minutes). Bottom line: Davis' production in late-game situations is off the charts. Just like his WPA.
What does this mean for MVP?
This is pretty compelling stuff for Davis' MVP campaign. Granted, he's missed 12 games and his ankle issue has to be concerning. But WPA is a counting stat, so that makes it even more jaw-dropping that he's been able to accumulate that high of a figure with all his missed action.
Simply put, Davis has been at his best when it matters most and no one comes close. His box score numbers were already crazy good, but the timing of those stats make his case even more convincing.
On that note, here's another fascinating thing on the Inpredictable.com leaderboard: If we just look at his box score stats alone, we would expect his win probability added to be plus-4.5 wins, just ahead of Curry (plus-4.22) for the league lead. But because Davis' best moments have come in the most critical times, his actual WPA soars past Curry. But that's not necessarily Curry's fault. The Warriors are so good that Curry seems to always play in garbage time. The Pelicans, however, are fighting for their lives seemingly on a nightly basis. And more often than not, there's Davis coming to the rescue.
That matters, of course. But WPA can't capture everything. It doesn't account for defense quite yet, which is critical in Davis' case because the Pelicans rank just 25th on that end. As good as Davis has been offensively in crunch time, we have to bring up the fact that the Pelicans rank 21st in clutch defense just behind the New York Knicks. High on blocks, but sometimes low on court awareness, Davis might have a hand in the Pelicans' underwhelming performance on that end.
Davis' WPA is just another measuring stick to throw in the pile of the MVP discussion. It puts a whole new spin on "Where would the Pelicans be without him?" Although it may not be entirely sustainable, you can't take away all the big moments he's had. Box score numbers are certainly important, but when those numbers occur has to be a part of the MVP equation as well. From that perspective, Davis has no peer. Did I mention he's 22? Trying to put a ceiling on this guy's career, now that is exhausting.