When You're The Best Player In The World And No One Cares

What do you call a

player

who averages 34 N and 10 per game with 62% effectiveness shooting in the face of the NBA? The

best

basketball

player

in the

world

. How about the player who is fourth in the NBA MVP rankings at this time 10 years ago? These numbers would have had a player in conversations as the greatest basketball player of all time, much less the MVP of a season, but now this stat barely gives you a chance to become the League's Most Valuable Player. I've been paying a lot of attention lately to how the MVP race is shaping up this season and it's going pretty much how you'd expect the season to start with Jic leading the race after a very controversial decision last season, then Joel Embiid transformed into a basketball God for two months and buried all the hopes of others. he won the award and then got hurt and yic jumped back to the front and has held first place ever since with SGA in second and Yannis in third, but as I looked back at this season's race schedule, one thing stood out.

Yo, why is Luca Donic so low? I'm going to go back and look at some of his performances and his numbers from this season and yeah, they're still completely unreal, so why is he in fourth place right now? a blow from Luca, everyone collectively decided that they were not going to vote for him. I don't know, maybe his playing style is too polarizing to reward his play right now, he's often compared to Prime James Harden and we all know how that turned out. out, but even though Harden and all the antics of him won an MVP award in the latest weekly NBA career summary, they seem to have taken a firm stance on his chances of winning the award up to this point.

Sorry, Mavs fans, but the standings matter. We understand that he scored 25+ points in nine straight games, but flashy highlights and massive numbers aside, Donic needs to get Dallas out of the game and out of tournament territory to climb near the top of this list, but that's not it. TRUE. In fact, I know it's not because other players have won as many games as Luca is winning this season with worse numbers and less individual dominance and still won the MVP. Luca Donic is being held to a higher standard than anyone else right now and I think he may be looking at the MVP award and how we misvalue players.

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when

Luca Donic first entered the league in 2018, he immediately surpassed every assumption we had about his game and his potential in his second season his 29 points, nine rebounds and nine assists per game earned him first team all-NBA honors and a fourth place finish in MVP voting. At just 21 years old at the end of his second season, the general perception was that this guy was the future of the NBA, an MVP award was inevitable and would happen sooner rather than later, but Luca is now in his sixth season in the league and despite improving almost every season, his spot in the MVP rankings has only virtually fallen.

Every season, voters seem to be less and less interested in this Luca magic. How did Luca's

best

case for being the NBA's MVP come in just his second season and has only gone downhill? Are we looking at the MVP award all wrong? It is even possible for someone to be the most valuable player in the NBA without elevating his team to a Contender title, a question that does not apply only to Luca but to any player in general, where exactly is the balance between individual dominance and the team's success in evaluating the best talents in the NBA, if the Nuggets suffered some injuries and had a difficult stretch of games and somehow fell to seventh place, would we be willing to admit that Nicole Yic is still the best and most valuable player in the league despite the team's lack of success it is possible to fatigue voters or even fatigue players before a player has won anything.

Here you have a number 41.8. This is the number you get if you combine the average points, rebounds and assists per game of each MVP winner over the past few years. 30 years old this season, Luca is averaging 53.2 combined points, rebounds and assists, the highest combined total since Kareem over 50 years ago in 1972, and putting up numbers like this usually results in winning games and winning an MVP, most of the players at the top of this list. They have earned the award for their efforts. Kareem missed out on the award in 1973, but he has already won back-to-back MVPs in the previous two seasons.

James Harden came in second in 2019, but he already won the award the previous season as well. Luca on the other hand, seems to be suffering from a rare case of voter fatigue before winning any awards. Raising the bar to first team all-NBA in your second season means that each subsequent year has to be even better if you really want to captivate the audience, and Luca has improved each season, so maybe he just isn't winning enough games. The unwritten rule about the MVP award has always been that not only do you need to be great, but your team must also be great, but in fact, this is not always the case.

Recently, that is not the case and voters have not shied away from rewarding exceptional seasons, even if they did not result in overall team success. In 1987, after just over two seasons in the league, Michael Jordan finished second in MVP voting, ahead of the generational talents and veterans of the '80s despite closing the season with a sub-.500 record and finishing the season on a 15-game losing streak in 23 games, he was young, unproven, and yet voters were still so enamored of his individual dominance that they simply overlooked the lack of team. One argument that can be made for this season is the fact that it happened almost 40 years ago in a league where numbers like this were unheard of, but a similar case of crazy numbers and individual performance surpassing overall team performance occurred again a few years ago. couple of seasons.

In 2022, Nicole Yic won the league MVP after finishing the season with only 48 wins and 6th place in the west, her numbers were incredible and her advancement metrics were even better; In fact, she was so good that the total of 48 wins was a bit lackluster. As an afterthought for many voters, the only thing is that this season the Mavericks are on pace to win 48 games as well and as loaded as Jokic's stat line was in that 2022 MVP campaign. Luca's numbers are almost so good this season, so how can one of These seasons earn a player his second straight MVP and the other barely earn a player a spot on the MVP rankings, but I think the most glaring case of a player The one that won over voters with a historic individual season was in 2017,

when

Russell Westbrook lit the entire league on fire for 81 games and averaged a 30th triple-double for an entire season.

This was just 7 years ago and it's already easy to forget how inconceivable this was at the time. There isn't a person on Earth who thought a player could average. a triple double for an entire season, so when Westbrook achieved it, the MVP award had his name and rightly so, but the Thunder finished with sixth place and only 47 wins, in fact, James Harden and Kawhi Leonard had strong arguments for be the winner. league's most valuable player That season, so again, what has changed between then and now? How did we go from being so enthralled with a stat like this to casually brushing aside a similar season in just 7 years, but not Westbrook's triple-double season in 2017?

Not only does he shatter our ideas of what was possible for an individual player, his season completely altered the way MVP voting works until Westbrook's 2017 season, the MVP award was practically the best player award in the NBA. best team if your team was not the No. 1 seed or, occasionally, No. 2 seed upon reaching the playoffs, your chances of winning the award were almost non-existent between 1988 and 2016. 23 of 29 regular season MVPs went to players who led his team to the best record in its conference, five of the 29 MVPs went to players who took second place and only one went to a player who did not lead his team to one of the first two places, but with Westbrook's MVP In 2017, award voters and fans in general almost recalibrated how they approached the discussion of who can be the league's most valuable player and what is required of him because four of the last seven MVPs finished the season with the third place or lower this season jokic is the favorite to win the award and the nuggets are on pace to finish the season with third place and something that has only happened once in 37 seasons and required the greatest player of all time to make the best individual season of his career is about to happen for the fifth time in just 8 years, it's almost as if overnight we all realize that winning the most games isn't the end all be all, Beall, about what what makes a player most valuable 10 years ago, an NBA fan posted this on Reddit and reading it is almost like jumping into a time machine and traveling back in time.

He goes on to list the last 30 MVP winners and their playoff position, acknowledging the correlation between winning the most games and winning the MVP, and posted this with a note at the end telling you everything you need to know. . how the award worked just 10 years ago. I put this here so people will stop making unlikely predictions about the MVP. No, Anthony Davis won't lead the Pelicans to fifth place and win the MVP, and the comments in this thread are just as revealing as the posts themselves, so is he really an MVP award in theory? Yes, but maybe he's more of a better player on the better team.

Players don't win MVP by getting six seeds the overwhelming majority of the time because this is a superstar league and superstars get top seeds and this. fan is right or at least he was 10 years ago so why did we make exceptions for other players and continue to do so but hold Luca to such a strict standard if the Mavs put together a nice winning streak to close out the season and finish with say 53 wins instead of 48 finishing fourth instead of sixth that would really help Lucas' case the Mavs could have an easy schedule to close the season Kyrie could go all out the team could get into a rhythm and win a higher position and Luca might be playing at the same level he did all season, but since they are winning more games, none of which had anything to do with Luca playing better, he would miraculously have a better case for MVP.

I know. That's how it works, that's the nature of this award, but it's still a little strange that so much weight is given to some factors when considering who the league's most valuable player is and the season Luk is having in particular. shining enormously. In light of this irrational way of approaching this, Jason Tatum is more valuable than Luca this season. You could argue, and I'm sure there are plenty of people who would include NBA MVP rankings, and yet Luca has been more valuable this season by virtually every metric except win total Jason Tatum has missed five games this season and in those games the Celtics have outscored their opponents by 70 seven points this season Luca has missed eight games and in those games the Mavericks have been outscored by 47 points when Jason Tatum is not on the court the Celtics are more 10.1 points per 100 possessions this season when Luca is not on the court the Mavericks are minus 2.8 points per 100 possessions this season when Tatum is not on the court the Celtics are still really good when Luca is not on the court the Mavericks are terrible at Looking at how many wins a team has as a determining factor in the MVP race ignores how teams earned those wins and how much the best player on that team is contributing. to those wins now this season could actually be a case of the leagueimprove a lot or perhaps simply the statistics improve rather than voters and fans appreciating different aspects of the game and its players than in the past, the threshold for what it takes for, say, an NBA team to win. earn the Superstar tag and win the League MVP has risen so high that a player could have an unprecedented season and not even receive a mention as one of the best players in the League.

A great case of this is Damonta Sabonis, who is averaging 20 points, 13 rebounds and eight assists per game right now and wasn't even selected as an Allstar this season. These are not empty statistics. He is not a product of the system he plays in. a certified star, but since there is a guy in the league who can do all this and more, he ends up being unfairly labeled as the watered down version of Nicole yic, it seems a little surreal that we live in a time where a player like Luca Donic exists With numbers like these and the MVP award not yet packaged and on his way to his house as we speak and this realization has less to do with Luca and more to do with the bigger picture of the league right now, it's hard for me to finish my Think About how much things have changed and it's even harder to understand how quickly they have changed.

How can he be so good and still be behind so many other players if it weren't for Embiid getting hurt? Luca may not even be among the best. five on the MVP leaderboard while averaging almost a triple double of 34. and is in Pace for 48 wins, which asks for theI wonder what a player in Lucas' position would have to do to win the MVP with sixth place, an underwhelming supporting cast and a handful of generational superstars to compete with what would be the equivalent of Westbrook's 2017 triple-double season in 2024, where the numbers are too absurd to ignore 38 10s and 10s maybe 40 points 12 rebounds and 12 assists T night in the League high efficiency sounds like hyperbole but it's not how good you have to be to win MVP in today's NBA when you set the bar as high as Luca did at such a young age, how much The higher you would have to go to make it impossible for fans and voters to ignore your efforts or is the MVP award still just the award for the best player on the best team?