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Love Luka, and an entertaining video, but we have to be honest here, he is not a top 2 candidate this year nor should he be. It's SGA and Jokic and with good reason - them two have just been THAT good. If I was casting votes they'd have my 1 and 2 locked. I"d have to give serious debate between 3 and 4 but I'm not entirely sure why outside of personally enjoying the beauty of his game more and perhaps since Giannis ain't gonna win it anyways, I'd rather give a vote to someone who hasn't when it's real close.
The video notes adding points-rebs-assists as the key metric, but reality is WS, WS/48, and PER are the metrics that nab MVPs in modern history. Yes, there are exceptions every ten or so years like Westbrook and the averaging triple double narratives, or Embiid winning last year because voters in prior years were racist and whatever. But those are actually kinda rare and to be honest, can be used to justify wayyyy too much in the sense that because somebody undeserving won it 10 years ago that any one of multiple people are deserving any given year is a floodgate that shouldn't be opened. Anyhow kind of like how in baseball batting average has lost importance, so has outright stat lines in the face of more analytics.
Win Share/48 and Win Share:
Jokic 1st: .296 14.5
SGA 2nd: .288 14.0
Giannis 3rd: .248 11.8
Doncic 5th: .217 10.3 (would note, it's a pretty big gap here top 2 versus rest)
PER:
Jokic 1st: 31.0
SGA 2nd: 30.0
Giannis 3rd: 29.9
Doncic 4th: 28.3
Think Dallas with Luka on the bench is painful enough? On/Off stats:
Jokic +23.4 points, estimated 51 wins
Giannis +12.2 points estimated 28 wins
SGA +11.0 points, estimated 23 wins
Doncic +7.9 points, estimated 19 wins
Which I think is what got lost in the video, it wasn't that Jokic won when Denver was a 6 seed that all sixth seed teams are created equal. It's that he took something resembling a historically awful team that otherwise would be lucky to win like 13 games, to a team with 47 wins. There's different levels of carrying teams and he carried a shit team by a magnitude greater.
Since I was talking about usage rates earlier:
Doncic 1st 36.0%
SGA and Giannis 2nd (Tie) 32.8%
Jokic 19th at 29.1%
Agree totally though the media does Luka dirty like when he got his 73 in a game and ESPN cried about it, just days after pumping Embiid's tires for getting 70. No disgrace to Luka, his play and numbers are incredible - and his moments of extreme brilliance are absolutely very top tier, but I think right now vegas has the odds right with Jokic, SGA, Doncic, and Giannis top 4, but there's no credible road in my view to have Doncic the MVP this year.
