For me, in determining “Player of the Year”, as in, “which five players defined this year for me,” the two primary considerations were “how good were you”, i.e. do I think you could be argued as a top five player, and “how relevant were you”, i.e. did you play for one of the year’s five most relevant teams. It is distinct from ranking the best players, or even best players among postseason teams, although the two rankings do
significantly correlate.
This year, I think there were six “relevant” teams overall: the Nuggets (1st seed champions), the Heat (conference champions), the Celtics (#1 SRS conference runners-up), the Lakers (conference runners-up), the 76ers (third in SRS, “best” conference semi-finalist), and the Bucks (overall 1st seed). Iffy one there is the 76ers, but Embiid was the league MVP and imo the second best player in the regular season, so for inclusion purposes we have the same effect. Outside of those teams, I would probably look to Curry and Kawhi as potential top five players in a vacuum, and maybe even Luka in an extremely abstracted sense, but without a true standout performance in either the regular season or postseason, none of them make the cut. Booker did play himself into the vicinity of that discussion but I do not actually see him as a top five player, nor did I ever think the Suns were a threat to win the title (and even post-Beal trade I have extreme doubts, because right now they do not have a frontcourt capable of surviving defensively through four rounds).
There are years where this approach can create problems. 2021 is most significant, where for the first time since 2002 (and 1990 before then), three of the four conference finalists did not have a top five player (although I would probably have all three team leaders in my top ten for season accomplishment). Curry missed the playoffs, Lebron was injured and a first round exit, Kawhi had a season ending injury, Luka was a first round exit, Embiid did not perform like a top five player in the postseason (*cough*), Durant played only 35 games… oh, and Gobert had an MVP-calibre defensive campaign for a dominant 1-seed. Wild COVID season all-in-all. Most of the time, I think there is sizeable overlap with top five players and top five teams for a season.
To illustrate that concept, I will quickly run through some recent ballots:
2022-1. Curry (personally still had Giannis as the better player, but strong edge in season accomplishment)
2022-2. Giannis
2022-3. Jokic
2022-4. Tatum
2022-5. Luka
So there, a top five relevant team (Heat) lost out to a top five relevant player on an irrelevant team, but I imagine the forum that placed Jokic at #1 for that year would probably not push back on that too much.
2020-1. Lebron
2020-2. Davis
2020-3. Giannis
2020-4. Jokic
2020-5. Butler
This year, the Lakers having two top players threw off the rankings a bit, and ultimately I did not think the Celtics being semifinalists surpassed Giannis’s regular season accomplishments. Both the Bucks and Celtics were highly relevant to telling this year’s story, but Tatum was not a top five player to me.
Contrasting with 2023…
A.) 2023 Embiid was a fair degree worse than 2020 Giannis;
B.) Tatum has elevated from his 2020 level;
C.) the 2020 Bucks were much more significant to the overall narrative of 2020 than the 2023 76ers were to 2023; and
D.) the Celtics were much more significant to the overall narrative of 2023 than they were to 2020,
so this time around I am more likely to exclude the league MVP over the leader of the functional fourth-place Celtics.
2019-1. Kawhi
2019-2. Curry
2019-3. Giannis
2019-4. Harden
2019-5. Embiid
Somewhat self-evident for those top four, with them constituting the top four best players and top four most relevant teams overall (even if the Rockets were only a second round exit). The challenge with fifth would be weighing a conference finalist (Lillard) against the leader of the toughest opponent faced by the champions (Embiid) against the guy I think was top five in the regular season (Paul George). Ultimately I felt better about the 76ers and Embiid’s playoff performance, so he earned the edge.
Returning to this year,
Jokic is number one. He was the best player, he won the title, and even if he had lost in the Finals, neither Tatum nor Butler are close to him as overall talents.
From there? Well, as alluded to previously (and outright stated at one point in the discussion thread), I am primarily looking at five other teams: the Heat, represented by Butler; the Celtics, represented by Tatum; the Lakers, represented by Lebron
or Davis, because the team did not excel so much that I think both merit inclusion; the Bucks, represented by Giannis; and the 76ers, represented by Embiid. Again, credit to Booker and Curry, but neither had laudable enough postseason or regular season accomplishments to overcome that barrier.
I will start with Giannis. For me he was the third best per possession player in the regular season. The Bucks earned the top overall seed. They lost in the first round to an 8-seed, for only the fifth time in NBA history, while being the first
ever 1-seed to not even win two games against their 8-seed opponent. Giannis himself accomplished nothing (the Bucks won their sole game without him) and played terribly after rushing back from injury, with an especially unforgivable performance at the line in the clinching Game 5.
Now, the Heat did make the Finals, making them more akin to the 1999 Knicks than to the 1994 Nuggets / 2007 Warriors / 2011 Grizzlies. They did shoot irreplicably well. And losing in the first round as a 1-seed did not prohibit me from including either Dirk or Mourning in the Player of the Year ballots for their respective years (I would have Dirk third or fourth in 2007 and Mourning somewhere in the top five). Still, Dirk won MVP, and I felt Mourning probably should have won MVP. Giannis was good, but he was not at the level of Jokic or Embiid, nor did he clearly provide more overall regular season value than someone like Tatum did. Can I keep a maybe #3, maybe #4 regular season player on my ballot when he is massively upset in the first round and can barely play? I do not think so, and that brings us down to four teams (albeit five names) for four spots.
Of those five names, I think two are automatic locks behind Jokic. Tatum was one of the five most valuable regular season players and made the conference finals. Butler was at least in discussion for top five regular season value and made the Finals. Tatum comfortably outplayed Embiid head-to-head, and Butler had one of the greatest series in NBA history against Giannis and the Bucks.
I bring up both Tatum and Butler simultaneously because their careers have now become intertwined in much the way we saw with the 1996-2000 Knicks/Heat or the 1993-2000 Knicks/Pacers. Three conference finals bouts in four years is going to establish some sort of rivalry. In the discussion thread, I put together this comparison:
AEnigma wrote:Jimmy Butler averages against Jayson Tatum in the postseason: 23.3/6.9/4.9/0.6/2.1 with 1.7 turnovers on 54.4% efficiency, +0.05 per game
Jayson Tatum averages against Jimmy Butler in the postseason: 25.6/9.4/5.8/0.9/1.2 with 4 turnovers on 58.6% efficiency, +3.25 per game
Now, Tatum has also averaged more minutes, so we can restrict it a bit further to see what they produce when on the court with each other:
Butler = 23.5 points per 75 possessions on 55% efficiency, 110 Ortg
Tatum= 23.3 points per 75 on 58% efficiency, 114 Ortg
This is nothing new, and I wrote as much last year for the peaks project.
AEnigma wrote:Tatum outplayed Butler last postseason but made the mistake of continuing onto the Finals and hurting his own averages. Early returns on this season are also showing why in three years he will almost certainly end up being an easy inclusion into the next project. Butler has the most outstanding individual postseason games, and accordingly has received the most votes and support thus far, but I think his narrative benefits disproportionately from those outliers rather than from his expected performance level. Bam is easily the best secondary piece for all of these seasons and I think his contributions go too undersold when trying to put all credit to Butler.
AEnigma wrote:[Butler] has some impressive playoff games and performances while in Miami, but consistency has been an issue. Rawer impact lags behind Jayson Tatum, arguably even in the postseason.
Where does that leave us?
- Tatum generally outperforms Butler head-to-head, although there can certainly be situational context for that (the Heat are less suited to defended Tatum than the Celtics are to defend Butler), and Butler’s turnover economy makes the real gap in production smaller than it may appear
- Tatum has generally been more “impactful” than Butler, although much of that is tied to team structure
- Tatum has consistently been healthier than Butler, both in the regular season and in the postseason
- Butler’s best games and series go beyond Tatum’s both generally and this season
- Butler is a better leader than Tatum… which you would expect given their respective ages and levels of experience.
- Butler was +9 in this series to Tatum’s +3; both were positive in four games, but Butler was only negative in two games whereas Tatum was negative in three games. I point this out because while the Heat found success without Butler in a way not true for the Celtics without Tatum, for this series, lineups with Butler still had the advantage, and it is tough to say Butler had disproportionally good support outside of coaching (that said, if someone were to say the gap between Spoelstra and Mazzulla may well be worth more than six points across a seven-game series, I would agree).
- Both players had arguably career best regular seasons this year, and undeniably career best scoring. Per game, I am not sure either established a clear edge in raw productivity.
- Through three rounds, I do not think either player established any advantage in productivity, and in a head-to-head comparison with two players who faced each other in the postseason, I am reluctant to penalise the winner for reducing their averages after the fact.
- By virtue of making the Finals and being responsible for a historically rare (arguably unprecedented) upset, Butler is much more essential to the overall narrative of this season (or at least of the eastern conference).
For me the #2 spot goes to Butler. I would feel more strongly about it had he not been injured, but he was, and that is what made this a real question. His body wore down as the playoffs progressed, with a stark gap between how he performed prior to missing that game against the Knicks and after. I understand the Tatum votes… he may well be the better player… but he did not define this year for me the way Butler did. This is not really a 1999 Knicks equivalent in that sense. Butler is a legitimate superstar and top ten player, with prior Finals experience. Yes, the defence played well. Yes, the shooting was otherworldly. Yes, after the Bucks series, Butler did not really “carry”. But unless Bam takes a substantial leap next year, this has been Butler’s team, and the team is in large part a reflection of him, and the team looks to him as a captain, and that all matters to me more than “oooh his team had a better point differential when he was on the bench and his injury sunk his averages enough to be disqualifying and he was obviously carried by his star defensive centre.”
…
WHICH BRINGS US TO THE LAKERS.
AEnigma wrote: Davis was absolutely the team’s most important player in their two series wins, and therefore on balance probably their most important player for the entire postseason. He also was not their best player in the regular season, nor has he ever been. He was not the team’s leader. He was not the engine of the offence (again despite what I have seen claimed…). And if we are going to suddenly weaponise plus/minus and on/off against the guy who was, then we need to have a long conversation about whether Jimmy Butler belongs on the ballot either. It is really frustrating to see how flexible standards can become when an injured and “contentious” player fails to live up to their usual production, even while captaining a conference finals team. Booker and Edwards and Brunson are all immortalised by BPM… but the guy right behind them was apparently too far below his regular season production to be taken seriously. Top ten in LEBRON, DPM, and EPM… ten in RAPM among stars, and eleventh in LA-RAPM… but oh, the regular season production was just not enough compared to someone like Steph (worse in everything except EPM). Oh, he is 38 and injured, so we know he cannot actively be that good anymore, results be damned, all hail the young wings, they are all basically the same on defence anyway.
I see a lot of “it was close” in the regular season, and yeah, kind-of, in the sense that it is not unfair to be so inspired by a postseason gap that it makes up for the regular season gap. I want to be clear on this though: the only decent “impact” measure that does
not prefer Lebron (who also played more than Davis, albeit not by much) is, somewhat ironically, LEBRON. EPM, DPM, raw plus/minus, RAPM (luck adjusted or otherwise), raw on/off… all of them place Lebron securely ahead. In a more meta sense, Lebron was and is the team’s leader. Lebron was the one on whom the team should have relied less — Lebron played something like 1100 minutes across the season with either Wenyen Gabriel, Thomas Bryant, or basically no one, and somehow, those lineups survived… and then in the postseason it turns out playing with no competent big (or high-level small-ball big) will in fact bleed points against elite and prepared competition. Shame on Lebron, I guess.
But okay, the injuries are what really “sunk” his season, right? Sure, when he set the scoring record, he definitely looked like a top five player, but that status may as well have vanished right there.
Quick exercise on that:
Player A — 27/10.5/5.5 on 58.5% efficiency with 3 turnovers on 40 minutes a game
Player B — 24.5/10/6.5 on 58.4% efficiency with 2 turnovers in 38.7 minutes a game
Player C — 27/6.5/6 on 56.5% efficiency with 2 turnovers in 39.7 minutes a game
That is, in some order, the postseason runs for Butler, Tatum, and Lebron. Was Lebron bleeding value defensively? No, if anything I thought he was probably the most valuable team defender of those three. A lot of respect to Tatum for how he handled Embiid at the end of that series, but Lebron performed similarly against Jokic while also being asked to switch onto Jamal. We are far off peak defender Lebron here, but that is irrelevant when looking at how he performed relative to other forwards. Peak Lebron would have been on another level past someone like Aaron Gordon, so our downgrade is him just being on the level of other capable superstars.
Okay, so Davis was better across two series, and on average the entire postseason. Was he a better player for the Lakers overall? Not asking more important, because literally speaking, yes, the team with no other centres needed that one centre to have any chance at success. Did he drive them more? I do not think so, and that is not some reluctance to place him ahead of Lebron.
Lebron wanted Davis to be ahead lol. The entire idea of this partnership was for Lebron to hand over the reins, but Davis needs to take them! Again, I am looking for season-defining players. What defines this Lakers season: Lebron carrying a garbage team to keep postseason hopes alive while Davis was injured (and securing the all-time scoring record in the process), or Davis anchoring the defence of a conference finals team? I understand those who confidently say the latter, but for me that is a close question.
Even then, for as much as we can talk about postseason averages, Lebron was the guy who showed up at the end. I do not think we should gloss over that so easily. All postseason, we heard talk about Lebron having another gear but deliberately taking a more passive approach to maximise the team’s chances to make a long run. I am not just referring to media voices here; that was straight from Ham and Lebron. Mind you, passive Lebron was still the team’s lead scorer and shot creator every round, but alright, how did that work out? He arguably cost them Game 5 against the Grizzlies, but hard to be too upset with that given the overall series results, and he was good for the team every other game. Could easily argue the rest of the team let him down in Game 2 and ruined their chance at a sweep.
Against the Warriors, he struggles in Game 1 and the team wins, but then we have a near identical repeat of the prior round’s Game 2 where Lebron shows up and everyone else goes cold (although with how the Warriors played, everyone would have needed to be in top form to win that game, so whatever). Team cruises in Game 3. Lebron struggles a bit in Game 4, so maybe we can say the team bailed him out, but overall still a nice contributor. Blown out in Game 5, no one’s fault particularly, and then he is again exceptional in Game 6.
So it is the conference finals, and Lebron has cruised but played well. They are outperformed in Game 1. Deep hole from the outset. Fine. Davis was better that game. 1-0, just need to go 4-2 rest of the way, same with the two prior series. Game 2, Davis is a letdown. I mean, on Lebron too for not having much left in the fourth quarter, but that game is on Davis in my eyes. Play at a superstar level, play like the best player on the team, and they win. Game 3, Davis bounces back… but then the team collapses in the fourth quarter, and Davis is especially rough. Borderline deciding quarter, in terms of “do we have a chance to win this series”, and he vanishes. Well, yikes, down 3-0,
surely the team’s best player, the guy who has defined this Lakers season, will show up with elimination on the line???
I think he did.
1. Nikola Jokic
2. Jimmy Butler
3. Jayson Tatum
4. Lebron James
5. Joel Embiid
