jazzfan1971 wrote:I would love to see you guys detail the thought process on some of these choices a bit more. If you are a stats guy, could you tell us what stats you prefer and the scores of the folks you were comparing? If you are just an eye test guy, maybe go into some detail what you are seeing that we might not be noticing?
Also, do we all agree that regular season awards are for the regular season? Or are you conflating playoff performance/prior season performance/potential future performance into your voting?
I definitely feel like I'm stronger using data than seeing things in real time with my eyes so if forced to choose I'd have to identify as a "stat guy", but I always emphasize that I've often butted heads with APBRmetrics-style stat guys because their approach to the analysis lacks a certain basketball realism. I'm always trying to think my way through the actual 5-on-5 basketball to ground my actual conclusion-drawing, and that includes trying understand what those with better eyes and better formal basketball experience can see. (Basketball was my favorite sport growing up and I played it constantly, but there wasn't anyone around really teaching the formal game until high school, and by that point I was undergoing severe asthma, while also not realizing I was going to grow another foot before I was done, so I kind of gave up playing serious basketball after that. This to say I can visualize things at my own speed pretty well, but more complicated team actions don't pop out to me the way they do for people with good basketball eyes.)
To answer your questions:
First, what I describe below is how I tend to look at things as the end of the regular season, and I've already shared how I update things in the playoffs.
So, during the RS, for POY/OPOY/DPOY, I tend to look hard at +/- stats, and +/- based stats. These stats aren't necessarily that helpful for giving clear information for more typical players, but if you're an outlier in your value, it's strange if I can't see you standing out in this way. To point to some specific things: Raw +/- & On/Off stats from nba.com or bkref.com, RAPM and luck-adjusted RAPM from nbashotcharts.com - source can change but that's the one I'm using right now, and then the more elaborate all-in-ones that do that pretty well, Estimated +/ (from
https://dunksandthrees.com/) and LEBRON (from
https://www.bball-index.com/) are my go-tos right now.
Additionally, I look at things like what I've named OnWins - games where the player had a positive +/-, and this is something that can help a superstar who is low in more raw +/-. The goal of the game is to get more points than the other team, not to blow them out by as much as possible.
I certainly look at box score stats too, and if I recognize that a player isn't actually the focal point of a team's opponents, I'm very cautious about interpreting their +/- as a sign that they are better than a higher primacy teammate. It's different on lower levels where sometimes the higher primacy guy is just never that valuable and so can be surpassed by a role player in impact (this makes me think of the Chicago Bulls right now where their high primacy guys have never really done much impact, and so while I wouldn't consider the Carusos of the world as stars, it's not that hard for them to surpass the DeRozans and Lavines of the world), but that has no bearing on POY/OPOY/DPOY.
I'm also looking at team performance. I will have a tendency to use that as something more than a tiebreaker. I'm not particularly interested floor-raisers whose style makes me concerned about their ceiling with that approach. In another setting - say baseball - this matters a lot less because you largely are just playing an individual sport organized to let as many people where a uniform while standing/sitting doing nothing as possible. Your batting, pitching & even fielding impact can be deduced separate from team context pretty well, and there's no reason to think that your play is suspicious just because your team sucks.
With OPOY & DPOY specifically I'm always more cautious with the use of +/- based stats because defensive action can lead to apparent offensive impact and vice versa. I don't think it makes sense to champion a guy whose action is primarily on one side of the court but has structures around him that lead to him looking excellent with the +/- on the other side of the court for the award based on the side of the ball the +/- says he's having impact on. In other words, I want a DPOY to be a guy you'd be able to anchor your defense, not an offensive star that's got a great context around him.
For ROY, I tend to look a lot at role and who the guy is playing against. I'm reluctant to pick a guy playing as role player ahead of a guy playing as star. I'm reluctant to pick a guy playing against bench guys over a guy playing against starters.
For 6MOY on the other hand, I tend to push away from the notion that it should be some guy who is the star of the bench and instead look at who seems like they are showing signs of impact.
For MIP, I often do strongly consider guys who have become all-stars in the past year, and that means by default that I tend to look at guys putting up bigger box score stats...but I also really prefer to see guys who are at least showing signs of +/- impact, even if I'm cautious about going too far with that. If you're a secondary player on a team, than that +/- might tell us more about who you're playing next to than anything else.
