That's a pretty poor summary on your end. I'd say what he mentioned about advanced stats has a lot of merit. People say all NBA shouldn't change because that's how it's always been done. But with MVP voting is okay to constantly change it?Rapcity_11 wrote:eyeatoma wrote:From a Philly journalist, but absolutely breaks down the issues with this seasons MVP.
#1 - Voter fatigue has been used as a way to shine a light on other incredible players of the league. It gets stale and boring when it's the same player.My point is essentially that I’d like it to be the way that it’s always been – that the old way is superior for telling the story of that NBA season/decade/era. The rush to do away with it is, in my opinion, the result of a combination of Jokic favoritism as well as the rush to make everything (including the purposefully vague Most Valuable Player award) purely empirical; no media member wants to be yelled at on Twitter for succumbing to a silly bias such as voter fatigue. NBA media has become, perhaps more so than any other sport, a battle for intellectual superiority, and holding onto voter fatigue is seen as anti-intellectual.
As great as Jokic was last season, he was simply irrelevant to the story of that NBA season. There was never a single moment where anyone considered the Nuggets to be a title contender. It wasn’t like he had a fascinating storyline behind him, or a bunch of iconic moments of late-game heroics, both of which helped to bolster Russell Westbrook’s case in 2017 (flawed as it was). Jokic was just mowing down the competition away from the spotlight, carrying an underwhelming roster to the sixth seed in the West and a first round exit. The season just didn’t feel like it was about him – and with him having just won, it would have felt appropriate to highlight someone else for that particular season.
#2 There isn't racism, but there are inherant biases and goal post moving that seems to happen amongst the media. Given that most media are basketball nerds they love Jokic, and use their biases to rationalize why he is winning MVPs, at times moving goal posts that were placed for other players in the previous years, which are then seemingly ignored for Jokic.To put it simply: Jokic is most media members’ favorite player, and so, you move goalposts and make certain arguments that you wouldn’t make for other players, because that’s what you do for your favorite player. It’s an incredibly human thing.
I absolutely despise all-in-one advanced stats (more on that in a bit), which have obviously helped to bolster Jokic’s MVP case over the past few years. I have always brushed aside players who are doughy and slow, compared to those who are more traditionally athletic – I was too low on Luka Doncic coming out of the draft, I always found the Joe Ingles hype annoying, and clumsy ass Brook Lopez is my least favorite player in the NBA. And, most importantly, I watch Joel Embiid play basketball every night, and it’s hard for me to fathom that there’s another center who is significantly better than him; saying Jokic is better than Embiid goes against my basketball world view, and that’s where my anger comes from on this subject.
The problem isn’t the existence of biases – on either side. The problem is that the biases have overloaded in one direction; if there were a more even balance of biases – if the MVP voting demographic were more evenly split between basketball nerds and scoring/bag fanatics (often these are former players) – we’d see a more closely contested vote to represent what should have been two closely contested races, and you wouldn’t see the rewriting of unwritten MVP voting rules that have been around for decades, like voter fatigue.
#3 Overvaluing advanced stats. Basically, states that some of these stats have huge outliers where 15-20% of players are ranked very high, and they're basically scrubs. So these stats ranks scrubs high, but then Jokic is at the top. Instead of taking these stats with a grain of salt, it becomes the end all and be all way to determine the best players.
Also, VORP and DPM highly value rebounds and assists are given more value for big men, it's the main reason why Jokic is always at the top. Some of these stats will always have Jokic leading because it's the style of basketball he plays.Let’s start on the surface, before digging into how they’re made. If I were to put out my own personal, subjective rankings of the top 50 NBA players, and they mirrored the rankings of FiveThirtyEight’s RAPTOR, I would be laughed at and called the single dumbest pundit on NBA Twitter. In the top 50 alone – which should be far and away the easiest group to rank – there are many comically out of place players.
Alex Caruso is 12th. Delon Wright is 18th. Josh Okogie and Derrick White are tied for 20th. Isaiah Joe is 32nd. Alec Burks is 41st. Austin Reaves and John Konchar are tied for 48th. I’m sure many people will call this cherry picking, but if 15-20% of the rankings that your metric spits out are obvious bull (spoiler: it’s more than 15-20%), then dare I say, your metric is not very good and should not receive widespread credence from NBA media members.
The first litmus test for these stats should always be common sense. If they directly conflict with common sense, it’s fine to disregard them.
Where these metrics are particularly bad is on the defensive end. RAPTOR, for example, has Jokic rated as the 3rd best defensive player in the NBA. That’s right – this guy is the 3rd best defensive basketball player alive.
RAPTOR very obviously overvalues rebounding (which, by the way, one could argue is a separate phase of the game from defense – you can be a great defender and bad rebounder, and vice versa). It also isn’t an ironclad argument to say that a center defending a high volume of shot attempts is a good thing; there are obviously a considerable number of shots that guards may be willing to attempt at the rim versus Jokic, that they wouldn’t against, say Embiid or Rudy Gobert.
Box plus/minus (and VORP, which is based on BPM) provides another such example. BPM places different valuations of stats based on what position you play. For centers, an assist is worth nearly twice as much as it is to a guard. Defensive rebounding is also far more valued for centers, and missed shot attempts are penalized more for centers than it is for guards. In other words: BPM massively overvalues everything Jokic is good at. It inflates the value of his assists and rebounds, and rewards him for being hyper-efficient and not attempting a super high volume of shots.
The idea that centers are getting twice the credit for assists as guards do is backwards; I would argue that, generally, assists from centers are less valuable, because a considerable volume of them comes from dribble hand-offs, where the center simply dumps the ball to a guard, who then creates the shot. Regardless, the point, once again, is that all of these evaluations are debatable, and all we are really observing is someone’s evaluation.
Jokic also ranks first (FIRST!) in the league in defensive box plus/minus, because it’s based on box score stats, which means it heavily weights, you guessed it, rebounding and steals. Jokic also ranks seventh in the league in individual defensive rating, and ninth in defensive win shares.
Individual defensive rating, contrary to what some people assume, is not simply your team’s defensive rating when you are on the court. It is an estimate of how many points that particular player allowed per 100 possessions while on the court. Here is an excerpt from Basketball-Reference’s website on how it is calculated:
“The core of the Defensive Rating calculation is the concept of the individual Defensive Stop. Stops take into account the instances of a player ending an opposing possession that are tracked in the boxscore (blocks, steals, and defensive rebounds).”
Noticing a pattern here? All of these stats are heavily based upon steals and defensive rebounding. Defensive win shares is based heavily upon individual defensive rating. You can find the formula for its calculation here.
A common rebuttal I get from people who use these kinds of stats is something to the following effect: “if they’re all saying the same thing, that has to mean something.”
Yes, it does mean something – that all of these stats are heavily based upon one another and clearly overvalue the same ****. They are essentially Collateralized Debt Obligations. That’s how you get a player who is very, very obviously a barely above average defender being considered one of the best defensive players in the entire league, because he gets a high amount of steals and is an excellent rebounder.
Great article!
https://www.rightstorickysanchez.com/the-good-oconnor-mike/031123
Not a great article. It's basically just whining that boils down to 3 things:
- Voting fatigue is dumb but it should continue because it favours my guy now (also admits that Jokic has the stronger case this year)
- Too many nerds are voting and we need more scoring enthusiast/bag voters (lol)
- Certain advanced stats are dumb, because I said so
Please.
Also, that author really needs to understand that something can be close but still definitive. A close MVP race isn't going to mean 50/50 votes.
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