Special_Puppy wrote:Black star wrote:Special_Puppy wrote:
I’d care about this if there was a pattern throughout Jokic’s career of underperforming against top performing teams, but Jokic’s impact basically holds up as far as I can tell. Sample this year of his scoring dropping is probably noise in a small sample size
Ok and the MVP discussion is for this season. I don't doubt that Jokic is capable of being great against great teams and he's a noted playoff riser but for this year in the regular season that's not happening which is relevant when SGA is.
If it’s probably just small sample size noise why should we care about it in regards to the MVP discussion? FWIW I've never been a fan of splitting out performance in a single season sample
Saying that it's noise in a small sample size misunderstands either what a small sample size is or what the population of data is. The entire dataset is the 2024-2025 season. The Nuggets play 24 games against the top 5 seeds which is the subset of that dataset relevant to my stat. To date they have played 12 of those games and 12/24 is a 50%, more than large enough to be a significant sample size. Jokic played in 8 of those so is at 8/20 and again has reached a large sample size. You seem to be trying to compare it to his historical numbers which are irrelevant to the 2024-2025 regular season.
It matters because it's significantly different compared to what SGA has done in comparison and they are the two MVP front runners. I like to give extra credit to players who maintain or exceed their averages against the best competition because obviously that's more impressive than lighting up lottery teams. This year that's not Jokic so far. That certainly could change