The past 10 days have thrust San Antonio Spurs forward Kawhi Leonard into the MVP conversation alongside James Harden and Russell Westbrook, who are putting up eye-popping per-game stats, and four-time MVP LeBron James.
Leonard's case is a bit different. It relies heavily on his Spurs' finishing with the league's best record -- a win Wednesday would pull them even with the Golden State Warriors for that honor -- and his ability to help San Antonio at both ends of the court.
Just how strong is Leonard's MVP case? Let's test it by considering the validity of three key Leonard storylines.
How much of the Spurs' success is due to Kawhi?
Whether San Antonio overtakes Golden State will have a big impact on Leonard's MVP chances. Before the season, I found that when the team with the NBA's best record has a player who finishes between second and fifth in my wins above replacement player (WARP) metric, that player has won MVP two-thirds of the time since 1980-81 (the first year media voted for MVP).
In fact, twice as many such players (10) have won MVP as players who finish second-through-fifth in WARP on teams who finish second-through-fifth in the league (five), despite four times as many opportunities. To qualify by this "rule," Leonard still has to finish in the league's top five in WARP, of course.
He's currently sixth, though there's little separation between the players after Westbrook and Harden.
The most extreme version of the team credit argument holds that Leonard should be MVP either way, as he has no other All-Stars on his team, while the Warriors have four of them. But this position overlooks the importance of San Antonio's depth.
The Spurs have eight players this season who have rated as worth at least two WARP -- more than any other team in the league. The Warriors have seven such players, while several teams -- including the Rockets -- have six apiece. Amazingly, the Thunder have just four players with two WARP or better: Westbrook, centers Steven Adams and Enes Kanter and guard Victor Oladipo.
This is reinforced by how teams have played this season without their MVPs candidate on the court. As ESPN's Royce Young noted last week, data from NBA.com/Stats shows that the Spurs (plus-8.4 points per 100 possessions) and Rockets (plus-3.7) have been far more competitive without their stars than the Cavaliers (minus-7.7) and Thunder (minus-11.7) without theirs.
Because of different rotations, that's hardly a definitive measure of MVP -- there's a reason ESPN's real plus-minus (RPM) adjusts for teammates and opponents in addition to incorporating box-score stats -- but it does serve to swat away the notion that Leonard is dragging an underwhelming San Antonio team to an elite record.
How important are two-way contributions?
The other primary argument for Leonard holds that he's the best defender among the MVP candidates, and because they're all good on offense, that should be the deciding factor.
Again, there's an extreme version of this, which holds that Leonard is the only two-way player in the group. I don't quite understand this use of the expression, as there are no designated hitters in basketball, but it is perhaps fair to say that Leonard is a two-way contributor, and Westbrook and Harden -- who both rate below average defensively in RPM, though Westbrook rates better than the average point guard -- are not. (The same argument doesn't hold with James, who actually has a better defensive RPM than Leonard, but more on that to come.)
Still, my issue with this line of thinking is twofold. First, there is reason to believe that offense is more important than defense. In recent seasons, teams have shown more spread in their offensive ratings than defensive ratings, which suggests that the offense controls more of the outcome of a possession than the defense does. (As Kostya Medvedovsky noted on Twitter, this has not always been the case, and there was generally more spread on defense than offense from 2004-05 through 2011-12.)
At the individual level, there's even more reason to believe that offense is more important than defense, given that good defense is as much about scheme as individual effort. Adjusted plus-minus ratings show greater spread of talent on offense than defense, as is reflected by RPM. (Four players have an offensive RPM as good as or better than the best defensive RPM, Utah Jazz center Rudy Gobert at plus-5.7 points per 100 possessions.)
Secondly, simplifying the offensive value of the leading MVP candidates to very good flattens the differences between them. Because of their role as lead playmakers, Harden and Westbrook are both responsible for creating far more offense than Leonard. Earlier this season, I showed that they're having two of the top three seasons since the ABA-NBA merger in combined usage (usage rate plus assists per 100 team plays). Leonard ranks 16th in this category, which is naturally dominated by point guards.
Although Leonard is more efficient, particularly once we account for how much less he turns the ball over, Harden's and Westbrook's larger roles make them superior offensive contributors.
Is Leonard really hurting the Spurs' defense?
One of this season's strangest statistics is San Antonio's having a defensive rating of 8.0 points per 100 possessions better with Leonard -- the league's defensive player of the year the past two seasons -- on the bench. Matt Moore of CBSSports.com attempted to explain this by teams sacrificing one offensive player in order to play 4-on-4 against the Spurs' defense, but I think there's a simpler explanation: 3-point luck.
Nylon Calculus' Justin Willard noted earlier this week that San Antonio's opponents shoot a higher percentage on 3-pointers with Leonard on the court (37.2 percent) than any other Spurs player.
This effect is enough to explain nearly the entire difference in San Antonio's defensive rating with and without Leonard. His on-court defensive rating would be 6.7 points per 100 possessions better if opponents shot as poorly on 3s with him on the court as they do with him on the bench (28.1 percent).
There's strong evidence that teams have little control over the percentage opponents shoot from 3-point range, and there's even less reason to believe individual defenders can affect it. Odds are this is a fluke and one that explains a large percentage of Leonard's decline from a plus-3.9 defensive RPM in 2015-16 (and plus-4.6 in 2014-15) to plus-0.8 this season.
If Leonard combined his defensive rating from last season with his offensive rating from this season, he'd have the NBA's best RPM. That's something of a stretch, given that Leonard has expended more energy on offense as his role has increased, but it's the kind of argument that could justify picking Leonard for MVP.