As we cross the halfway point of the NBA season, we are set up for what should be the most raucous and divisive MVP race since Russell Westbrook's win in 2017 -- and one of the most unusual in NBA history.
A lot of voters -- this one included, as I have an official ballot -- try to compartmentalize by considering only the discrete 82 games (or now 72) of each season. We give the award every season; it is for that specific season. What happened last season shouldn't factor in. What might happen in the playoffs is irrelevant.
That's what we tell ourselves, anyway. But the voters -- about 100 media members -- are people, not robots. We are stricken with cognitive ticks that muddy any attempt at compartmentalization. Nagging thoughts about narrative and legacy and past and future performance figured to play an outsized role this season even before Brooklyn Nets guard James Harden entered the picture as one of the most unconventional MVP candidates in league history.
Harden probably isn't going to win, and he shouldn't, but he has played himself into the race to the point that several major media outlets have devoted significant air time and virtual ink to his candidacy. Joel Embiid suffering a knee injury Friday night may crack the door slightly for Harden.
The MVP is probably the only individual award where finishing second, third, fourth, or fifth has historical import. How many third-place finishers for Sixth Man of the Year and Most Improved Player do you remember? Do you care that Kendrick Nunn finished ahead of Zion Williamson in Rookie of the Year?
We remember some MVP runners-up because the races were close, the results controversial: Harden behind Westbrook in 2017 (and behind Stephen Curry in 2014-15); Shaquille O'Neal barely behind Steve Nash in 2004-05; Michael Jordan and Hakeem Olajuwon behind Charles Barkley in 1992-93, when Jordan actually finished third; Jordan behind Karl Malone in 1996-97, in one of the closest races ever.
But even a single top-three finish, or a few fifth-place ribbons, can carry weight decades later when the Hall of Fame debates candidates and every media outlet crafts all-time player rankings in the summer when there is nothing else to do. It means that in at least one season you stood near the apex of the greatest league in basketball, or that you and your team somehow captured the imagination of the sporting public in some rare way -- or both.
Whether you agreed with the results or not, it absolutely matters that Blake Griffin and Joakim Noah finished third and fourth, respectively, in 2013-14. They faded from prominence at different paces. Injuries sapped them. But in their prime of primes, they were central characters atop the NBA. It distinguishes them from guys who pile up more counting stats, maybe even as many All-Star nods, but never crack the MVP discussion -- never feel as important to the league's biggest storylines.
The discourse surrounding last year's top two finishers -- the Milwaukee Bucks' Giannis Antetokounmpo and the Los Angeles Lakers' LeBron James -- was primed to get messy and interesting and maybe a little edgy in the media even before Harden and two behemoth centers crashed the MVP race. Antetokounmpo has won the past two MVPs, outpointing James easily last season.
Antetokounmpo's statistical case was almost unassailable -- at least according to almost every publicly available statistic. He also won Defensive Player of the Year. The Bucks finished with the best record in the NBA.
And then the world went haywire, and for whatever reason -- including the Miami Heat exposing the remaining holes in Antetokounmpo's game -- the Bucks flamed out in the postseason. James and the Lakers rose up. It was a reaffirmation: Duh, LeBron is still the best player when it matters. In celebrating the title, James, stone-faced, demanded his "damn respect."
As our Brian Windhorst noted last month, James has not won MVP since 2013. You can explain away each individual season. I've had an official ballot in every season starting in 2013-14, and have not voted James as MVP in any of them. At the time, each vote felt fine -- close in some seasons, but fine. I don't regret any of them now. In totality, it still seems undeniably stupid that that guy we all recognize as the best player alive has not won MVP in eight years. It just does.
Even if the voting criteria suggests you do it -- and even if you train your brain to do it -- it was always going to be impossible to separate this MVP race from what happened in the Orlando, Florida, bubble. Only Wilt Chamberlain, Bill Russell, and Larry Bird have won three consecutive MVPs. Some of the game's all-time luminaries -- Jordan, Magic Johnson, LeBron, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar -- never three-peated as MVP.
Russell and Bird's Boston Celtics teams won multiple NBA titles during their three-season MVP stretches. Chamberlain's Philadelphia 76ers won it all in the second of those three straight Dipper MVP campaigns.
The coolest, most rational sorts can lambaste this line of thought all they want -- and it is not unreasonable for them to do so -- but the idea of shepherding Antetokounmpo into this most exclusive of clubs will feel off to a lot of voters in the aftermath of Miami wiping out Milwaukee in the second round.
On the flip side, there is a clear pull to reward James a fifth MVP as something of a career capstone. He is having an MVP-worthy season: 25 points, eight rebounds, and eight assists on tidy 51% shooting -- 36% on 3s, 59% on 2s. The two other leading candidates -- Embiid and Nikola Jokic -- outpace him by most advanced metrics, but not all of them. James is in a virtual tie for No. 2 in the field of nine candidates in Value Over Replacement Player (behind Jokic, and by a lot), and No. 1 in ESPN's fancy real plus-minus stat.
The Lakers are plus-9.1 per 100 possessions with James on the floor, and minus-4.4 when he rests -- the second-fattest on-off gap among the major candidates, trailing only Embiid. That sustained during the Lakers' slide without Anthony Davis; the Lakers are plus-20 with James on the floor since Davis went on the shelf, and minus-31 with James on the bench, per NBA.com
By historical standards, James is having an MVP-level season -- just not a no-brainer MVP season. As of now, it would rank midtier among all 65 prior NBA MVP seasons: almost exactly in the middle in points per game, 49th in Player Efficiency Rating, 61st in win shares per 48 minutes.
Again: Some advanced stats are much kinder to James. His season would not look out of place even a little among prior MVPs.
It's just that Jokic and Embiid have been well ahead on the statistics scoreboard -- advanced and otherwise -- all season. Jokic has the best statistical case across the board. Embiid is close enough at No. 2 that his advantage in defense -- which some stats capture, some only kind of do, and some barely do -- would catapult him above Jokic on lots of ballots. It's unclear now how much Embiid missing two weeks with a knee injury, as reported Friday night by ESPN's Adrian Wojnarowski and Ramona Shelburne, will impact his case.
And after being written off in the race over the first two months, Antetokounmpo has shot just above the LA Clippers' Kawhi Leonard and even James statistically. The top four, right now, should probably be Jokic, Embiid, James, and Antetokounmpo in some order. There is a lot of season left. This may evolve week to week, even day to day. Let's see where Denver, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, and the L.A. teams end up in standings. Denver and the Dallas Mavericks -- with Luka Doncic looming -- seem poised for strong second halves.
There are five candidates very close behind those top four -- so close, you could make plausible arguments for each of them at almost every ballot spot except perhaps No. 1 and No. 2: Damian Lillard, Stephen Curry, Doncic, Leonard, and Harden. (Others might push Rudy Gobert into this group given the Utah Jazz's league-best record and scoring margin. Kevin Durant was a top-tier candidate early, but he has missed half the Nets' games. Even if he plays every game from here on out, it's hard to imagine him getting back into the race. Irving has been outstanding in his own right, and merits some consideration for a ballot spot too.)
Various factors -- team record, middling on-off numbers, the sheer greatness of that potential top four -- have knocked these five back in the race for now. (One example: The Golden State Warriors are 19-19, and have outscored opponents by only 1.4 points per 100 possessions with Curry on the floor. None of that is Curry's fault, but the MVP ballot involves a lot of hair-splitting.) Some among them will make hard pushes. Someone will get injured. Some team will slump.
The introduction of Harden is an interesting variable. No player has ever won MVP after being traded during that season. Five players have won in their first season with a particular team: Chamberlain and Wes Unseld as rookies, and then four veterans who won it after offseason trades -- Abdul-Jabbar for the Lakers in 1975-76; Moses Malone in 1982-83 for the Sixers; Barkley for the Phoenix Suns in that 1992-93 season; and Steve Nash for the Suns in 2004-05. As an early-season trade protagonist, Harden is distinct from those guys by only a matter of weeks or months. He's not a sibling, but he's a cousin.
The first-year-with-a-team candidates add a fun and complicating wrinkle. They are fresh and new. They represent reinvention for a moribund franchise. They can generate huge year-to-year changes in a team's win total. It is easy to see their immediate impact.
The "new guy" effect tends to produce some of the tightest and most hotly contested MVP races. O'Neal is still claiming that 2005 MVP over Nash. (O'Neal was also in his first season with a new team -- the Heat -- that year.) Barkley's win over Jordan in 1993 has been revisited ad nauseam. Jason Kidd pushed the New Jersey Nets from 26 to 52 wins in 2001-02 after the Nets stole him from Phoenix, and nearly snatched the MVP from Tim Duncan despite Duncan's far superior statistical case. (Kidd shot 39% that season!)
The Nets vocally disagreed with the decision. Byron Scott, then their coach, proclaimed the voters had gotten it wrong.
Kevin Garnett helped Boston leap from 24 to 66 wins in 2007-08, butting into what became a four-player race between Kobe Bryant (the eventual winner), Chris Paul, Garnett, and James. It was acknowledged out loud before the voting that Bryant might draw some lifetime achievement votes.
"Look at it this way as many voters must be: Paul is 22 and has many years to win MVPs," Mark Heisler wrote in 2008 in the Los Angeles Times. "Bryant is in his 12th season, and it may be getting embarrassing to explain why the game's best player has never come closer than two third-place finishes." Lots of writers on lots of platforms expressed more or less that same thought. I was slightly partial to Paul that season, but all four candidates had strong cases. (ESPN's writers were all over the place in their voting.)
A similar sentiment may help James in this season's voting. Harden is the "new team" guy -- the Garnett/Barkley/Nash of this season's race.
But the barrier to winning his second MVP should be very high for Harden considering the nature of his exit from the Houston Rockets. The eight games he played there constitute 11% of this season -- a non-trivial share. They will constitute an even greater percentage of Harden's individual season, because he has missed a few games.
He put up numbers in those eight games, but if you watched them, you know Harden was disengaged. Opponents outscored the Rockets by 6.6 points per 100 possessions with Harden on the floor during his final Houston stretch -- and won the minutes Harden rested by almost the same amount, per NBA.com. You can't erase that from his candidacy for an award based on play in this particular season.
Well, you could if a perfect storm of variables aligned. One would be Harden playing fantastically since. He has done that. A second would be Harden's recent postseason play inspiring lingering regrets about past MVP snubs. Umm, nope.
A third would be a void of high-caliber candidates. That is very much not a concern.
You can have an unseemly first 10 games and force a trade, and still be a deserving All-Star (I voted Harden a starter) and All-NBA player. The MVP is a different thing.
This whole discussion will probably fade once Durant returns. Durant is Brooklyn's best all-around player -- by far the best defender among its Big Three. Right or wrong, superstars often trade MVP points for wins when they team up. James did win back-to-back MVPs in Miami after Derrick Rose snagged it during James' first Heat season; Rose benefited from the notion that James had "too much help" to be MVP. Perhaps voters felt that less in the following years as Dwyane Wade fell off a little and Chris Bosh became more of a spot-up shooting third banana. James was also superlative in those two seasons -- two of the best individual seasons in league history.
Bird and Magic won MVPs on stacked teams. But when Durant joined Curry, Klay Thompson, and Draymond Green with the Warriors, it was assumed -- correctly, it turned out -- that Curry and Durant, both prior MVPs, had taken themselves out of the running. (Durant finished ninth, seventh, and eighth in his three Golden State seasons. Curry finished sixth, 10th, and fifth.)
The Nets have outscored opponents by six points per 100 possessions with Harden on the floor -- good, but not incredible. They are about even in the 308 minutes Harden has played without both Irving and Durant, according to NBA.com. Harden has done a nice job carrying Brooklyn bench units. Steve Nash has entrusted Harden with the most solo minutes among his three stars, and Harden is maybe the best equipped among them to thrive in those situations.
Harden has been brilliant as a Net. He's already second in franchise history in triple-doubles, which is both amazing and a little funny. Someday, the voting body might buck precedent and award MVP to someone traded in-season. I'm skeptical Harden is or should be that player. Just getting on the ballot is going to be hard -- for Harden, Lillard, Curry, and others.
Everything will change if Durant continues to miss major time, or if Irving does -- and Harden lifts the Nets. Even then, Harden winning seems a stretch given what Jokic, Embiid, and James are doing.
With or without Harden as a serious candidate, the next two months figure to give us a rollicking MVP debate.