doozyj wrote:Wow just wow. I think your reputation just went up significantly with this non-biased post.
Well, reading his posts in this thread aren't giving me the impression that he changed anything in his view. He did take all those stuff into account and came up with LeBron James as the best candidate for the MVP. The "V" means valuable, which isn't related to the "best player" or "being the most perfect player". Sometimes it just means to the perfect fit for a team in a certain season with the necessary skills and performances. That is the reason why the MVP award for Steve Nash was complete reasonable. No player had a bigger offensive impact on his team than Nash in those seasons. Therefore you have to take into account how his teammates are playing with and without the said player.
I have still LeBron James as the best candidate with Bryant as the 2nd best. Why? Nobody in his right mind would trade Gasol, Odom, Artest and Bynum for Shaq, Mo Williams, Delonte West and Varejao (whoever you think is the 4th best player on the Cavs). Matter of fact is that the Lakers have a huge advantage in terms of height and strength. Gasol, Artest and Odom are in their respective primes, something which can't be said about Shaq. Bryant has just not so much to do to get the Lakers rolling as James. And someone asked what Bryant could do better. Well, he could always raise his scoring efficiency and lower is turnover ratio, that is something he can really improve. The differences in the roster lead me to believe that the seperation between the Lakers' and the Cavs' record needs to be around 8 to 10 wins to give Bryant the edge at the end of the season. The MJ 96 analogy isn't working here, because Jordan led the league in a couple of things in 1996 and they also had some injury/suspension problems which made it necessary to give heavy minutes to guys like Jud Buechler, Dickey Simpkins or a 40 yr old James Edwards in some of their games. Especially the Bulls frontcourt lacked depth, something you can't say about the Lakers. Before the 95/96 season started the team was projected to win between 60 and 65 games, nobody expected to see the first and only team winning 70+ games.They exceeded the expectation, the Lakers were projected to win 65+ games, so far I don't see them really win 70+ games.
James has the higher PER, Win Shares and adj. +/- in this season so far, Bryant has the edge in Net+/-. Bryant is statistically speaking not that far away (4th in PER, 3rd in Win Shares), but he is still 2nd. Nowitzki is 3rd in the MVP ranking ahead of other, because he has the highest adj. +/- (33 the next best has 25), the highest Net+/-, is 2nd in Win Shares and 5th in PER so far this season. Well, watching the Nets game might give an example. The Mavericks were +30 with Nowitzki on the court in 35 minutes, but they managed to be -14 without him in 13 minutes. And the number didn't come in garbage time (in fact the Mavericks even went from -18 in 10 minutes without Nowitzki on the court to -14 in the last 3 minutes), the Mavericks are just a bad offensive and defensive team without Nowitzki.