All of Your NBA MVP Takes Are Wrong

Joel Embiid, Nikola Jokić and the annual debate over the league's top individual honor.

The beauty of our annual fretting and frothing over MVP is that it’s an award with no specific definition, allowing for a broad and wondrous spectrum of perspectives, philosophies and choices, each of them valid in their own right.

Nevertheless, I am sorry to inform you that all of your MVP takes are wrong.

I don’t mean your actual choice is wrong. If you’re a Nikola Jokić advocate, great. His résumé is robust. Joel Embiid? Eminently worthy. Giannis Antetokounmpo? Freakishly qualified.

It’s not the names that are problematic—it’s the arguments. It’s the clichéd rationales, the half-baked axioms, the braying certitude. I’ve covered the NBA for 25 years, been an awards voter for most of it, and I still can’t proclaim with absolute certainty what the MVP is (though I have my own definition). But I can tell you what it is not.

The MVP is not simply the player with the highest PER, nor the guy with the most Win Shares, nor the gaudiest EPM, BPM, PIE or VORP—nor any other all-in-one alphabet-soup stat.

All the advanced stats are useful, but they are neither authoritative nor definitive. Each has its flaws and quirks, favoring certain factors over others. They’re a guideline to help shape our evaluations, not some objective “answer” found in Appendix 3 of your Beginning Algebra textbook. They do not prove any player’s case on their own. They cannot account for human attributes like leadership or inspiration, or their effect on chemistry and camaraderie, or factor in the vagaries of an NBA season.

There is no mathematical formula for determining MVP. If there were, we could just fire up the ol’ algorithm and ask Alexa for the answer—no debate necessary, no ballots required. Where would the fun be in that?

The same goes, by the way, for all the conventional stats. No one wins this award on points and rebounds and assists alone.

Which brings us to this: The MVP is not the Most Outstanding Player, or the best player, or the player who had the best season, or the player who had the most historical season.

If the objective were to name the NBA’s “best” player, LeBron James would have won MVP every year from 2005-2020. (He won four.)

If the point is to name the most “outstanding” player for a given year, Shaquille O’Neal would have dominated the award from 1998 through 2003. (He won once.)

If the goal is to reward historic performances, Kobe Bryant would have taken it in 2006, for averaging 35.4 points, 5.3 rebounds and 4.3 assists—marks previously reached only by Elgin Baylor, Wilt Chamberlain and Michael Jordan. (Bryant finished fourth.)

Being the best, the most outstanding or the most history-making is laudable, but not automatically MVP-worthy.

The history-making thing is also becoming strained. In today’s NBA—with its frantic pace, increased possessions, voluminous three-pointers, higher skills and ultra-high-usage stars—we see at least one player compiling a “historic” statistical case every season. (Also, through the magic of Stathead.com, you can almost always contrive a statistical combination that results in something unique.)

But back to dismantling definitions.

No, the MVP is not the best player on the best team, though it’s a nice ideal. O’Neal was the best player on the best team (the Lakers) in 2000 when he won MVP. Ditto for Steph Curry in 2015 and 2016. But it was not the case when Allen Iverson won in 2001, or when Bryant won in 2008, and was certainly not the case when Russell Westbrook won in 2017, for a 47-win team.

Sometimes, the best regular-season record is simply the result of a great ensemble, not a transcendent player. Consider the 2001-02 Kings, who won a league-high 61 games. Chris Webber was their foundational star, but their success was part Webber, part Vlade Divac, part Mike Bibby, part Peja Stojakovic. Webber finished eighth in MVP voting. Current analog? The Suns, who have the best record by far, but no definitive MVP candidate. Devin Booker is their engine—much as Webber was for the Kings—but the Suns’ dominance is part Booker, part Chris Paul, part Deandre Ayton, part Mikal Bridges.

Booker has put together an excellent season, to be sure, just not at the level of Jokić’s or Antetokounmpo’s or Embiid’s.

Bill Streicher/USA TODAY Sports

Speaking of that group: If Jokić wins MVP, it will be his second in a row. If Antetokounmpo wins, it will be his third in four years. So while we’re knocking down dumb tropes, let’s dispense with this one: that MVP voters frequently “suffer fatigue” or “get bored” and search for shiny new candidates. In the last 20 years, five players have won back-to-back MVPs, including James, who did it twice in a five-year span. The others: Tim Duncan, Steve Nash, Curry and Antetokounmpo. That’s a lot of repeat MVPs for a supposedly bored voting panel.

When an MVP does fail to repeat, it’s usually because either his team faltered the next season, or because the player failed to match his own lofty output from his MVP year. Sustaining that level of individual and team excellence is hard!

Speaking of team excellence: The MVP is not the player who did the most with the least help. Nor is the MVP the answer to the hypothetical, “If you took Player X off of Team A…” These constructs elevate stars saddled with weak supporting casts, and downgrade stars who are fortunate enough to have co-stars.

Under this definition, Magic Johnson couldn’t have won because he had Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and James Worthy; Michael Jordan couldn’t have won because he had Scottie Pippen; O’Neal couldn’t have won while playing with Bryant; and James couldn’t have won while flanked by Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh.

As an aside, the “Take Player X off Team A” device is inherently silly. EVERY team with a superstar would be substantially worse off without him—it’s just a matter of degree. A team with no other stars might fall from top four to the lottery. A superteam might simply slide from 60 wins to 45, but still make the playoffs. That doesn’t make one player a more worthy MVP than the other. It just means one carries a heavier burden.

As a corollary: Let's take it easy with all the plus-minus/on-off citations. Yes, some teams struggle more than others when their star sits or is injured. Yes, that does underscore the star’s value to his team. But it often says more about the team’s roster construction (and possibly their injury issues) than it does about the star’s MVP worthiness.

If you’re elevating Jokić because he kept the Nuggets afloat without Jamal Murray and Michael Porter Jr., then you’re effectively downgrading Antetokounmpo and Embiid for having more talented (and healthier) teammates.

Additional corollary: A team winning lots of games without its best player doesn’t negate that player’s MVP worthiness. That the Grizzlies went 20-4 without Ja Morant this season is weird and amazing and impressive as hell. But it’s more a testament to their depth, their chemistry and how hard they play, and possibly some good luck. It almost certainly wouldn’t hold up over 82 games. And it doesn’t diminish Morant’s value, because the Grizzlies’ ultimate ceiling will still be dictated by him.

See, here’s the thing with this entire debate: Individual excellence and team success are inextricably intertwined. And you need both to be MVP. The history of the award underscores the point: Of the last 40 MVPs, 38 anchored teams that won 50-plus games (or the equivalent in a shortened season). The overwhelming majority of MVPs since 1981 have come from elite teams or, at minimum, plausible contenders.

That historical precedent means something. In lieu of an actual definition, it tells us how we’ve come to understand the award. Simply put: In this league, we don’t generally bestow MVP on a player from a merely good team, or a middling team, or a plucky overachiever. No, to be MVP in the NBA means anchoring a contender (or at least a plausible contender).

The reality is, this isn’t purely an individual award. If it were, we’d have MVPs from .500 teams. But winning matters in this debate. It’s always mattered. It’s just a matter of where you believe the cutoff should be: 50 wins? 47? 44?

There’s an unspoken sliding scale at work in every MVP conversation, weighing all the stats, all the fancy analytics, supporting casts and, yes, the dreaded “narratives” of the season. It’s just that each person’s scale is calibrated a little differently. Awards voting is art, not science, and we shouldn’t try to pretend otherwise (or, you know, try to make it science).

All of your MVP takes are wrong, because the MVP isn’t determined by any single formula, any specific prism or any one definition. It’s not any of these constructs; it’s all of them combined. It’s 100 individual voters, each sorting through the data and the narratives and the context, weighing player stats and team success and coming to their own conclusions.

I’m merely one of those 100 people. And, well, I could be wrong.