With the postseason officially around the corner and teams jockeying for position, it's time for another edition of the NBA mailbag.
Throughout the NBA season, I will be answering your questions about the latest, most interesting topics in basketball. You can tweet me directly at @kpelton, tweet your questions using the hashtag #peltonmailbag or email them to peltonmailbag@gmail.com.
This week's edition of the NBA mailbag includes:
- A WNBA comp for Luka Doncic?
- Whether an MVP has ever not been the best player on his own team
- Winning without many points from your leading scorer
"Is Diana Taurasi a good comparison for what we've seen from Luka Doncic as a rising star in the NBA?"
-- David, Park City
Comparisons for Doncic have been such a popular pastime that my colleague Tim MacMahon and I teamed up to write a story about them during the 2020 playoffs, but the leading scorer in WNBA history is a fun new one.
As a starting point to quantify this idea, let's look at an updated list of most the similar seasons based on a modified version of my SCHOENE projection system, which looks at several key statistical indicators, height and weight. (The full SCHOENE projections incorporate weighted performance over three seasons; this version uses only a single season.)
As I noted last year, LeBron James' current production is easily the best match for Doncic. Although these stats are all standardized for league averages, the evolution of a modern "heliocentric" style of play with everything running through a star capable of creating shots for himself and others means that there's a strong recency effect. You have to go down to No. 11 (Grant Hill) to find a season from the 1990s and all the way back to No. 20 (Larry Bird, just ahead of Magic Johnson) to find one from the 1980s.
OK, so now let's run the same exercise using WNBA seasons standardized for those league averages:
Undoubtedly, Taurasi is the closest match for Doncic the WNBA has seen, with Candace Parker recording the two other seasons exceeding a similarity score of 90. (It's also evident from the years involved that the WNBA hasn't made the same kind of move toward heliocentrism.) Still, the Taurasi comparison doesn't seem quite as apt statistically as the one to James for a couple of reasons.
First, while Taurasi is tall for a WNBA point guard at 6-foot, she's still shorter than the average player in the league. At 6-foot-7, 230, Doncic is bigger than the average NBA player. Doncic is also more of a triple-double threat than Taurasi, who has only one season (2009) rebounding at better than a league-average rate. Conversely, Taurasi's career-high 55% 2-point shooting in 2013 was relatively more impressive than Doncic's 57% mark this season because the league average mark was so much lower in the WNBA at the time.
Ultimately, Taurasi isn't considered the WNBA's GOAT (rightly or wrongly) primarily because of her statistical production. That's more a testament to Taurasi's history of big performances on the biggest stages, including three national championships at UConn and three WNBA titles with the Phoenix Mercury. Despite his impressive track record of big shots by age 22, Doncic has a long way to match that.
On a tangential note, one thing that occurred to me when it seemed like Harden was almost becoming the MVP favorite is whether it'd be the first time a player who wasn't the best player on his own roster won MVP.
I'm going to assume this means "best player on the roster" at the time, not historically -- that is, Bob Cousy winning the 1956-57 MVP with a rookie Bill Russell as his teammate on the Boston Celtics doesn't count.
From that standpoint, I see seven awards for which there's a reasonable debate to be had. Let's go through them:
Bob Cousy, 1956-57 Celtics: This still qualifies, because Bill Sharman led Boston in scoring and win shares and joined Cousy on the All-NBA first team.
Wes Unseld, 1968-69 Baltimore Bullets: The only rookie to win the NBA's MVP award, Unseld got the majority of the credit for the Bullets' 21-win improvement, but Earl Monroe had a case for MVP as well.
Willis Reed, 1969-70 New York Knicks: Reed was the Knicks' leading scorer and rebounder, but Walt Frazier wasn't far behind in scoring, shot a better percentage from the field and averaged 8.2 assists per game. Frazier led the team in win shares.
Dave Cowens, 1972-73 Boston Celtics: Cowens' 16.2 rebounds per game and playmaking from the post earned him MVP over John Havlicek, the team's leading scorer with superior efficiency. Remarkably, Havlicek made All-NBA First Team, while Cowens did not -- Kareem Abdul-Jabbar got the center spot.
Moses Malone, 1982-83 Philadelphia 76ers: Adding Malone, who had won MVP with the Houston Rockets the previous seasons, helped lift the Sixers to the top of the Eastern Conference standings. Julius Erving got overshadowed despite comfortably leading the team in Basketball-Reference.com's value over replacement player (VORP) metric.
Steve Nash, 2004-05 and 2005-06 Phoenix Suns: The debate over the most valuable member of the Seven Seconds or Less Suns was perhaps the only one to play out in real time -- I even weighed in on it. In 2004-05, the viable alternative was Amar'e Stoudemire, who got one first-place vote. With Stoudemire sidelined much of 2005-06 after microfracture knee surgery, Shawn Marion got more credit for his defense. Modern metrics tend to paint Marion as the most valuable player on those teams; he finished sixth in RPM wins in 2004-05 and fourth in 2005-06. Nash was 43rd and 28th, respectively.
Funny enough, none of these cases featured the highest share of MVP votes by a teammate of the winner: That came in 1995-96, when the 72-10 Chicago Bulls had enough credit to go around that Scottie Pippen finished fifth in the voting despite Michael Jordan getting 109 of the 113 first-place votes.
Ultimately, we turn back to how to define "best player." I guess I'd go with what voters would say if we did an NBArank-style evaluation of the top players coming out of that year's regular season headed into the playoffs, assuming health -- which is the criteria by which teammate Kevin Durant presumably outshines James Harden.
In each of the cases I've listed, I think the panel would agree with the MVP vote as far as the best player. There has never really been a situation in which a slightly less regarded star took center stage in terms of value because of a teammate's injury.
"The Memphis Grizzlies were led in scoring by Kyle Anderson, Ja Morant and De'Anthony Melton, who all scored a team-high 13 points in an 89-85 win against the Miami Heat a month ago. What are the lowest game-highs?"
-- Adam (Budapest)
I decided to focus on output in wins with the help of ESPN Stats & Information and Elias Sports Bureau. Unsurprisingly, the 13 points by the Grizzlies' three leading scorers are the fewest for a winning team this season. Memphis seems to specialize in this. Of the six games in which the winning team's outright leader (i.e., no ties) scored just 17 points, the fewest this season, two of them were by the Grizzlies -- both over the Philadelphia 76ers. (Morant had 17 on Jan. 16; Dillon Brooks had 17 on April 4).
Going back further, a few teams have managed to win in the post-merger era without a player reaching 13 points, many of which involved Mike Fratello coaching. Per Elias, the lowest shared leading total is 10 points by Avery Johnson and Vernon Maxwell for the San Antonio Spurs on March 25, 1997, a game they won 64-59 over Fratello's Cleveland Cavaliers. (No, I don't miss the style of play in the late 1990s. Why do you ask?)
As far as outright leaders, Derrick McKey topped the Indiana Pacers with 12 points in their 77-78 win over the Cavaliers on March 23, 1994 (Fratello's first season as Cleveland's coach), and more recently Chandler Parsons had 12 for Memphis in an 80-64 win over the Dallas Mavericks on Nov. 18, 2016.