If James Harden is truly deserving of what the NBA calls the Most Valuable Player award, then the NBA should change the name of its biggest award to Player of the Year.
By Jordan Zuniga
What the heck does the most coveted individual award in the NBA, the MVP, even mean?
On June 25, the NBA presented its yearly awards at its second gussied-up award ceremony, and it announced James Harden as the MVP.
Harden no doubt had a stellar season, dropping 30.4 points per game while dishing out 8.8 assists, grabbing 5.4 boards, and picking off 1.8 passes a game.
But was he the most valuable player in the league?
Because if the award is truly about how valuable a player is to a team, I don’t think Harden is necessarily the most valuable player to the Rockets.
Last season, he had a pretty similar line to the one he had this year: 29.1 points, 11.2 assists, 8.1 rebounds, and 1.5 steals. For those sabermetric lovers out there, his win shares (number of wins a player contributes) was almost identical as well, 15 in 2017 and 15.4 in 2018.
That Harden and his team won 10 more games than they did in the season before was probably because of the acquisition of Chris Paul.
If the NBA’s biggest award truly adhered to what its name implies, there is no question whether LeBron James should have won the award.
James and the Cavaliers lost their second-best player in Kyrie Irving. In return, James got Isaiah Thomas, who barely played 15 games for the team before heading to LA.
This left James with a considerably worse team than the one he had the year before, yet the Cavaliers only lost one more game.
The Cavs did that because James stepped up his game. His stats in every major category were the same or better than they were the year before, and his win shares made a full 1.1 jump from 12.9 to 14.
James also dramatically increased his VORP (value over replacement) stat as well, which for the most valuable player award might be the most important statistic.
Last year, James put up a 7.3 VORP; this year, it jumped to 8.9. Harden’s VORP score fell this season, from 9 last season to 8.3 this year.
There’s a decent argument that old school, non-nerdy stats tell more than the complicated new stats made possible by computers.
Even looking at those, James can still make a decent case for MVP. He had 27.5 steals, 8.6 rebounds, 9.1 assists, 1.4 steals, and 0.9 swats per game, pretty comparable with Harden’s numbers.
All this to say that Harden’s team got better on paper this offseason and won 10 more games, while James’ team got significantly worse than last year’s and managed only one fewer win.
By all the important measurements, it sure seems like James was clearly more valuable than Harden.
But then, the NBA doesn’t award the most valuable player with the MVP award, does it?
It seems to me that the NBA awards its most coveted individual award to the best player, perhaps even the most popular player, each year as opposed to the most valuable.
Which is why I contend that the NBA should just change its award name from the MVP to the Player of the Year. That would be a more accurate representation of the award it gives out.
