Special_Puppy wrote:lessthanjake wrote:RB34 wrote:So now the advanced stats favour Jokic is it purely team record that sways it for SGA? And “fatigue”?
I don’t know that the advanced stats do clearly favor Jokic though. In “actual EPM,” SGA is at 8.8 while Jokic is at 8.7. In LEBRON, Jokic is at 6.75 while SGA is at 6.54. Am not a huge fan of using DPM to measure things retrospectively, but it has Jokic at 6.7 and SGA at 6.3. Basically, they’re pretty neck-and-neck in impact-box hybrid metrics. Jokic is ahead in box-based metrics like BPM and win shares, though SGA is still at incredibly high levels in those. I think if you look at the overall data picture, Jokic maybe looks slightly ahead (mostly on the back of a decent-sized gap in BPM), but SGA is genuinely close. And that’s no knock on Jokic—his data looks GOAT-level—but rather a reflection of how well SGA is doing.
Overall, I don’t see this as an example where there’s such a gap in advanced metrics that there really needs to be much at all to sway things towards SGA. The data is close enough that it’s all definitely within a margin of error and shouldn’t give us a high degree of certainty that Jokic is better, and so if SGA’s team does historically well then I think it’s a pretty easy choice for MVP (even though I think Jokic is the better player).
It’s a pretty easy choice if we think the gap between the Nuggets and the Thunder is because of SGA being more valuable than Jokic. If we think that the gap is because SGA’s supporting cast is better than Jokic’s then team record doesn’t tell us much either way.
I think that that line of thinking presupposes that a player’s team’s record isn’t its own independent variable that goes into the MVP calculus, regardless of whether the better record is specifically due to that player’s contributions. I think the bottom line is that team record matters here even if we assume that the difference is solely caused by difference in supporting cast quality. That might seem unintuitive, but I think it’s consistent with how the award has been voted on in general over the course of its history. At the very least, a data tie pretty much always goes to the guy on the more successful team—especially if that more successful team has done historically well (which OKC has done so far).
And that does make some sense, when we think about it from a CORP-like perspective. If Player A and Player B have equal impact in terms of affecting their teams’ net rating, but Player A’s supporting cast is much better and so Player A’s team is incredible while Player B’s team is merely good, then the impact Player A is having is adding a lot more to his team’s chance of ultimately winning the title (because chances of winning a title go up pretty exponentially as SRS goes up). And while MVP is a regular-season award, I think people do think about it in part from a perspective of how a player has positioned his team to contend. Even if we assume their individual impact is similar (or even that Jokic’s is a little higher), SGA is still definitely seeming to position his team to contend more than Jokic is, and his existence does increase his team’s chances of going on to win the title more than Jokic’s does—even if that’s ultimately just a function of SGA having better teammates. That’s essentially how I think of it here, and I think that’s consistent with how the award has been voted on in the past (with 1997 being a caveat that I think was inconsistent with this). Crucially, I’ll note that this logic would naturally make team records less important to the calculus when no relevant candidate has a team that did incredibly well, because a team’s chances of winning the title goes exponentially up as they get extremely good, so differences in record/SRS reflect more of a difference in title chances as the records/SRS get higher.
In any event, though, even if we wanted to just zero out the impact of the supporting casts and think purely about individual impact, how well the team did is another data point about individual impact alongside the other data we have. It’s *definitely* not a precise data point about individual impact because there’s so many other variables at play (i.e. the quality of the supporting cast), but if two players have essentially equal individual metrics but one has way better team results, then it’s not unreasonable to decide that you think the guy with the far better team results was probably more valuable/impactful, even if just using that as a tiebreaker between other data. Might it actually just be because his supporting cast was that much better? Yeah. In fact, if the individual metrics say they were similar, then logically those metrics are actually saying the supporting cast was that much better. But the metrics we have are all flawed, and thinking that the star player on a team that is like 8 SRS better was probably more impactful is definitely not unreasonable, especially when individual metrics don’t actually suggest the guy on the better team was really *less* impactful. In this particular case, I don’t personally think that’s the case—I do actually think Jokic is a little more individually impactful (which means my thinking is more in line with the paragraphs I wrote above)—but I don’t think it’d be unreasonable to look at the individual data and the team records and decide that SGA was probably more individually impactful.
