The following is an excerpt from my year-end awards column. Click here to read the entire post.
There are four serious contenders for this year’s MVP: Kobe Bryant, Chris Paul, Kevin Garnett and LeBron James.
LeBron continues to grow. His gaudy averages – 30.0 points, 8.0 rebounds, 7.2 assists, 1.8 steals and 1.1 blocks – seem to get gaudier by the year. But the Cavs will finish below that important 50-win mark, which means that they simply aren’t an elite team. Throw in the fact that Cleveland is just 27-23 against the East and the record looks even worse. The MVP award hasn’t gone to a player on a team with fewer than 50 wins since the 1981-82 season, and the streak won’t be broken this year.
All due respect to Kevin Garnett, but his numbers just aren’t MVP-caliber. I don’t look solely at stats, but they play a pretty big factor and Garnett is one of eight players who average at least 19.0 points and 9.3 rebounds a game, so it’s not like he’s in exclusive company. If KG does defy the odds and win his second MVP, it will be due to the defensive mindset that he brought to the Celtics. The team’s transformation on that end of the court has been something to behold. This is why KG is all but a shoe-in to win the Defensive Player of the Year, which isn’t a bad consolation prize.
So it’s down to two. It’s tough to compare the stats of a point guard like Chris Paul to a scoring guard like Kobe Bryant, so I like to double the assist numbers and add that total to the average points to determine the total number of points that the player is directly responsible for. In this case, we’re looking at 44.3 for Paul and 39.3 for Bryant. Paul also averages almost a full steal more than Bryant, shoots more than two percent better from the field and a full percentage point better from the free throw line. Paul’s Points Per Shot (PPS) is 4% higher than Bryant’s. And he does this all with 1.6 fewer minutes per game, so he’s clearly more efficient than Kobe, which gives him an advantage in EPG (+1.0) and EPM (+0.055). Kobe is the better rebounder (6.4 to Paul’s 4.0), but other than points, that’s the only stat in which he’s superior to Paul.
And then you have the likeability factor. Paul has it and Kobe doesn’t. Bryant is no doubt a popular player, but he’s also the league’s most hated. Meanwhile, Paul seems to be universally loved. Like it or not, being the most valuable player to some degree requires a player to be a good teammate, both on and off the court. Kobe’s on-again/off-again trade demands last summer, along with his decision to throw Andrew Bynum and Mitch Kupchak under the bus, have destroyed any shred of “good teammate” rep that Kobe had left.
Some sportswriters will weigh the likeability factor more heavily than others, but I think most voters are just looking for an excuse not to reward Kobe’s offseason antics by giving him his first MVP. And in Chris Paul they have the perfect alternative. No one thought the Hornets would be this good and CP3 is one of those guys that simply makes everyone around him better. If you only consider the on-court performance, an argument could be made that Kobe’s season is more deserving, but the NBA is not played in a vacuum, and Kobe’s wild summer will seep into voters’ minds, as it should.
Paul wins it in a tight finish.
Photos courtesy of Flickr.
