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What do you call a player who is averaging 34 N and 10 a game on 62% true shooting the face of the NBA the best basketball player in the world how about the player who is fourth on the NBA’s MVP leaderboard at the moment 10 years ago these numbers would have had a
Player in conversations as the greatest basketball player ever let alone the MVP for a season but now this statline hardly even earns you a shot to become the League’s Most Valuable Player lately I’ve been paying close attention to how the MVP race is playing out this season
And it’s going about how you would expect the season started out with jic leading the race coming off a very controversial decision last season then Joel embiid morphed into a basketball God for two months and buried all hopes of anyone else winning the award and
Then he got hurt and yic jumped back out in front and has held the top spot ever since with currently SGA in second and Yannis in third but as I was going over the timeline of the race this season one thing jumped out at me why is Luca donic
So low I’m going back and looking at some of his performances and his numbers from this season and Yep they’re still completely unreal so why is he all the way in fourth place at the moment have voters gone on a Luca strike they all just collectively decided they’re not
Going to vote for him I don’t know maybe his play style is just too polarizing to reward his game right now is often compared to Prime James Harden and we all know how that turned out but even Harden and all of his Antics still won an MVP award on the NBA’s last weekly
Recap of the race it seems they’ve taken a strong stance on his chances of winning the award up to this point Sorry Mavs fans but the standings matter we understand he scored 25 plus points in nine straight games but flashy highlights and massive numbers aside donic needs to lift Dallas out of play
And tournament territory to climb near the top of this list but that isn’t true is it in fact I know it’s not because other players have won just as many games as Luca is winning this season with worse numbers and less individual dominance and they still went on to win
The MVP Luca donic is being held to a higher standard than anyone else right now and I think we might be looking at the MVP award and how we value players all wrong today’s video is sponsored by DraftKings tournament time is officially here so fill out your bracket and place
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Sportsbook when Luca donic first entered the league in 2018 he immediately leapfrogged all the assumptions we had about his game and his potential by his second season his 29 Points nine rebounds and nine assists a game earned him first team all NBA and a fourth place finish in the MVP voting at just
21 years old by 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 it would happen sooner than later but Luca is now in his sixth season in the league and despite getting better nearly every
Single season his place on the MVP leaderboard has only Fallen virtually every season voters seeming to become less and less interested in this Luca magic how did Luca’s best case for the most valuable player in the NBA come in just his second season and has only gone
Downhill since are we looking at the MVP award all wrong is it even possible for someone to be the most valuable player in the NBA while not elevating their team to a title Contender a question not applying to just Luca but to any player in in general where exactly is the
Balance between individual dominance and team success when evaluating the top talents in the NBA if the Nuggets ran into some injuries and had a tough stretch of games and somehow fell to the seventh seed would we be willing to admit that Nicole yic is still the best
And most valuable player in the league despite the lack of Team success is it possible to get voter fatigue or even player fatigue before a player has even won anything here’s a number for you 41.8 this is the number you get if you combine the average points rebounds and
Assists per game of every MVP winner over the last 30 years 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 near the top of this list have earned the award for their efforts Kareem missed out on the award in 1973 but he already won back-to-back MVPs in the previous two seasons James Harden came in second in 2019 but he already won the award in 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 just your sophomore season means every year after that must be even better if you really
Want to Captivate an audience and Luca has gotten better every single season so maybe he’s just not winning enough games the unwritten rule about the MVP award has always been that you not only need to be great but your team needs to be great but this isn’t always the case in
Fact recently it’s hardly the case and voters have not shied away from rewarding exceptional Seasons even if it didn’t result in overall team success in 1987 after just over two seasons in the league Michael Jordan finished second in MVP voting ahead of generational talents and vets of the 80s despite closing the
Season with a record below 500 and finishing the season on a stretch of 15 losses in 23 games he was young he was unproven and yet voters were still so enamored by his individual dominance that they just looked past the lack of Team success one argument you can make
For this season is the fact that it happened nearly 40 years ago in a league where numbers like this were unheard of but a similar case of crazy numbers and individual performance outweighing overall team performance just happened again a couple seasons ago in 2022 Nicole yic won the league MVP after
Finishing the season with just 48 wins and the sixth seed in the west his numbers were incredible and his Advance metrics were even better in fact he was so good that the lackluster 48- win total was a bit of an afterthought for many voters the only thing is this
Season the Mavericks are on Pace to winning 48 games as as well and as loaded as jokic’s statline was in that 2022 MVP campaign Luca’s numbers are just about as good this season so how does one of these Seasons earn a player his second consecutive MVP and the other
Hardly even earn a player a spot on the MVP leaderboard but I think the most glaring case of a player winning over voters with a historic individual season was back in 2017 when Russell Westbrook lit the whole league on fire for 81 games and averaged a 30o triple double
For an entire season this was just 7 years ago and it’s already easy to forget just how inconceivable this was at the time there is not a person on Earth who thought a player could average a triple double for an entire season so when Westbrook pulled it off the MVP
Award had his name on it and rightfully so but the Thunder finished with the six seed and just 47 wins in fact James Harden and Kawhi Leonard both had strong cases to be the most valuable player in the league That season so again what has changed between then and now how did we
Go from being so captivated with a statline like this to just casually brushing aside a similar season in just 7 years but Westbrook’s triple double season in 2017 didn’t just shatter our ideas of what were possible from an individual player his season completely altered the way MVP voting works alog
Together up until Westbrook’s 2017 season the MVP award was virtually the best player on the best team award if your team wasn’t the first seed or on occasion the second seed going into the playoffs your chances of winning the award were almost non-existent from 1988 to 2016 23 of 29 regular season MVPs
Went to players who led their team to the best record in their conference five of the 29 MVPs went to players who earned the second seed and only one went to a player who didn’t lead their team to a top two seed but with Westbrook’s
MVP in 2017 voters of the award and fans in general almost recalibrated the way they approached the discussion of who the most valuable player in the league can be and what is required of them because four of the last seven MVPs finished the season with the third seed
Or lower this season jokic is favored to win the award and the nuggets are on Pace to finishing the season with the third seed as well something that only occurred once in 37 seasons and required the best player of all time to put up 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 is not the end all Beall to what makes a player the 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 into the past he goes on to list the last 30 MVP winners and the seed they earn going into the playoffs recognizing the correlation between winning the most games and winning the MVP and he posted this with a note at
The end that tells you everything you need to know about how the award worked just 10 years ago I put this on here so people hopefully stop making unlikely MVP predictions no Anthony Davis is not going to lead the Pelicans to the fifth seed and win MVP and the comments on
This thread are just as insightful as the post itself so is it really an MVP award in theory yes but maybe it’s more of a best player on the best team players do not win MVPs getting six seeds 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 we hold Luca to such a strict standard if the Mavs went on a nice stretch of wins
To close out the season and finish with let’s say 53 wins instead of 48 finished with the fourth seed instead of the sixth would that really help Lucas’s case the Mavs could have an e easy schedule to close out the season Kyrie could go on a tear the team could get
Into a rhythm and earn a higher seed and Luca could be playing at the same level he did all season but since they’re winning more games none of which had anything to do with Luca playing better he would miraculously have a better case for the MVP I know this is how it works
This is the nature of this award but it’s still a bit odd that there is so much weight put into some factors when considering who the most valuable player in the league is and the season luk is having in particular is shining a massive light on this irrational way of
Going about this is Jason Tatum more valuable than Luca this season you could make the argument and I’m sure there’s a lot of people who would including the NBA’s MVP leaderboard and yet Luca has been more valuable this season according to virtually every single metric other than win totals 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 isn’t on the court the Celtics are plus 10.1 points per 100 possessions this season
When Luca isn’t on the court the Mavericks are minus 2.8 points per 100 possessions this season when Tatum isn’t on the court the Celtics are still really good when Luca isn’t on the court the Mavericks are terrible to look at how many wins a team has as the driving
Factor for the MVP race neglects how teams even got those wins and how much the best player on that team is contributing to those wins now this season might actually be a case of the league getting a whole lot better or maybe just the stats getting better rather than voters and fans appreciating
Different aspects of the game and its players than they did in the past the threshold for what it takes to make let’s say an all NBA team earn the label of Superstar and win the League’s MVP has been raised so high that a player could have a one of one unprecedented
Season and not even get a mention as one of the League’s best players a great case of this is damonta sabonis who is averaging 20 points 13 rebounds and eight assists a game right now and he wasn’t even selected as an Allstar this season these are not empty stats he’s
Not a product of the system he plays in he is a certified star but since there’s a guy in the league who can do all of this and more he ends up being unjustly labeled as the watered down version of Nicole yic it feels a bit surreal that
We live in a time where a player like Luca donic exists with numbers like these and the MVP award isn’t already boxed up and on the way to his house as we speak and this realization is less about Luca and more about the big picture of the league right now it’s
Hard for me to wrap my mind around how much things have changed and even harder to grasp how quickly they have changed how can he be this good and still be trailing behind multiple other players if it wasn’t for embiid getting hurt Luca could very well not even be within
The top five on the MVP leader board while averaging nearly a 34. triple double and being on Pace for 48 wins which begs the question what would a player in Lucas’s position need to do to win the MVP with the six seed an underwhelming Supporting Cast and a handful of generational Superstars to
Contend with what would be the equivalent to the 2017 Westbrook triple double season in 2024 where the numbers are just too absurd to ignore 38 10 and 10 maybe 40 points 12 rebounds and 12 assists T night on League high efficiency it sounds like hyperbole but
It’s not how good do you have to be to win the MVP in today’s NBA when you put the bar as high as Luca did at such a young age how much higher would you need to go for it to be impossible for fans and voters to ignore your efforts or is
The MVP award still just the best player on the best team award
32 Comments
Make a video on how the nba is getting rigged!
Should have added d rose and his mvp. His numbers were slightly above avg but they had the best record in the east. Crazy.
As a low consumption NBA fan, I honestly thought he and Jokic were the same guy. Not sure I can call myself a fan now
He's 2nd in MVP race now. Might just win it !
This man's voice singlehandedly moved Luka to the 2 spot in MVP
I think mvp is who can you put in the most different situations that give you the highest chance of winning. For instance, between Jokic and luka. I feel if you swap them and put luka on the nuggets then the nuggets wouldn't be a championship contender. However there is no doubt in my mind if you swap jokic to the mavericks that they wouldn't be in the position they are in they would be near the top. And I would say the strongest argument you have would be Luka vs SGA but again if you were to swap their teams Luka would still score the amount he does but he still wouldn't be able to fill SGA's shoes in the OKC lineup. Where as SGA on the mavs he would still get the scoring and would open up more possibilities on how the team can play. So while Luka is a really great player I feel he isn't the most valuable one.
Well, I guess 1.7M people care….
The whole "your team has to be winning for you to be mvp" is dumb. If you're the best player ever but on the worst team, you can't win. But then you add 2 solid pieces and your team becomes top 4. Suddenly, you're mvp.
I don't think people understand how much influence this guy has on the media perception of the league after this video, luka is now NUMBER 2 on the MVP ladder. true definition of a basketball influencer.
If mavs are up higher in the West than he would move up
7:39 bc Aaron Gordon was their next most productive player haha this ain’t really that crazy or controversial. Luka does have some help in Kyrie now. Much better than the year you’re comparing with NJ. And then when you compare Luka to NK’s 2021, you fail to mentioned the landscape and in your own calculation Nikola led the league in that stat.
Performance margin is relative.
Thats the issue with your analysis here. Luka is putting up gaudy numbers… but so is Giannis. Players are consistently putting in mid 40s on teams much better. That was not the case in Nikola’s 2021 MVP year. If it was he likely wouldn’t have won.
I can prove it. Jokic put up better numbers in 2022. Did he win the MVP? Despite winning the title AND improving individually? What changed? Landscape. Who led the league in your own stat? Not Jokic. And Jokic got help from Murray and Porter Jr.
Even the 2011 controversial race this still mostly holds up. Lebron’s numbers weren’t INSANE but they were very good. He had help. Obviously. And the mvp of that season didn’t put up eye watering lines either. BUT crucially they won the east AHEAD of Lebron. And importantly lebron never beat D rose a single time in the regular season which is all that matters here.
2016/17 is also interesting. Russ also led the league in turnovers like Luka is which I found interesting . But again, landscape. In 2016 Russ was contending with Harden. Mind you, a Harden you yourself can acknowledge had a polarizing play style not always appreciated. In 2024 SGA is leading a team second in the west. Giannis? Second in the east. The rockets were a rung below the likes of a 2024 bucks or OKC in Luka’s landscape.
So yeah. It makes sense. Luka’s numbers spiked but he got an all star teammate – even without being named one in 2024 kyrie is putting up 25, 5, and 5 on 50% shooting. If you aren’t going to be on a team with 50+ wins, you can’t also have a great player on a title contention team putting up huge numbers. See 2021. Curry led the league in a team 9th in the west and missed the playoffs. Enough said. Giannis was putting up great numbers but he also had an all star teammate. Further proving the point anecdotally that is used “against” a candidate.
Im going to let that 87 Jordan comment slide haha you know better than that bro. LD is NOT doing what Jordan did in 87 which Michael did literally by himself. Charles Oakley was their next best player at the time.
Charles Oakley. And to bring this full circle, Jordan didn’t even win. Just bc he was 2nd doesn’t mean it was close. It wasn’t.
You can win the MVP on a not great team, that’s true. But there can’t be anyone else with incredible stat lines on good teams. Which sounds so incredibly logical put like that.
Bc it really is.
Good video but the thing about some of those on/off court points plus minus is that the way the teams are structured makes a big difference. The Celtics are loaded, if Tatum is out, others know they have to play different and do more — and because they are so good, they CAN. Dallas, outside of Kyrie, has no one who can do more….it's more or less a bunch of role players. For the games missed, the stat is not even significant with only samples of 5 and 8 games, which all may have their own underlying reasons for being what they are.
probably has something to do with this far left america that we live in today. a lot of mold in the brain nowadays.
beautiful video, its just biased morons who vote based on what the media portrays. he doesnt need an award, we already know luka is top 3 players all time
Since this video dropped along with a few others 👀 media been slowly talking about 77 🔥
People aren't gonna like the answer but it's that Luke doesn't want to have "it". Westbrook, Lebron, Rose, Harden, Jokic, etc. during their MVP seasons had that drive to fight and win on the court. Yeah people clown Jokic for how he is off the court but on the court it is no question that he is locked in. When it comes to Luka we don't see that hustle and it drives people away from voting for him. So simply put it's just because it looks like he barely wants to be out there sometimes.
i think there's definitely still some merit to saying the mvp is still best player best team despite it not going to one seeds because over the last few years a lot of one seeds have not been the best teams or at least teams anyone has any faith in for the postseason
Great video.
Ever since Embiid got hurt, I've been saying Luka should win MVP this year and I haven't changed my mind. Theres only like 7-8 games left in the season for each team, so I don't think I will change my mind, even if the Mavs finish 8th.
He’s a fantastic player..but not exciting to watch
It's a frustrating and almost pointless debate… People can't even agree on what criteria should be used to judge MVP: best player on the best team? Player who's team needs them the most? Most triple doubles? Best singing voice?
That's why everyone in these comments can make the case for THEIR guy, while saying the guy who they hate SUCKS.
Personally, the one thing I think we should all be able to agree on is that Kendrick Perkins is an idiot. But that's just me.
The NBA has always, and still has, an obvious anti-white racism issue. Not at all surprising.
Well he's a white boy
It’s different every year
The year Jokic won as a 6th seed, there was arguably only Embiid better but he was only the 4th seed.. This year, Jokic & SGA are both having just as impressive years as Luka but leading their teams to a top seed..
It changes by year sometimes
Luka is 2nd on the list now
Here is my opinion: Luka is very good but very boring to watch….that's not good when dealing with the media‼️‼️
"Dominance" is what I think is needed to win the MVP and not only personal dominance but team dominance as well. (There were just some cases that were record altering that made the cut). For Luka to win an MVP, his team must also start winning more games.
But actually he could win this year. Fingers crossed.😅😅
Racially biased because he's on a non "championship" team. The media always treats dallas like this
His first mistake is that he is not american. The second, even worst mistake is that he is not black. And nba analysts are extremely racist.
These videos are so tedious. People cherry pick stats and ignore all context and then act like the voters are inconsistent. Luka has amazing raw numbers, but his advanced stats this year are not all-time great, and Giannis, SGA and Jokic are also having incredible seasons. Giannis has nearly the raw numbers to match with better efficiency and some of the best defense in the league. Jokic is continuing to destroy the advanced stats and on/off metrics with a much better record and stronger defense.
I'll keep saying it, but win shares is the only metric that matters when the MVP award is involved. The player who's play impacts winning the most should be the MVP. Luka has piss poor win shares compared to his opponents: 1. Jokic, 2. SGA, 3. Giannis, 4. Sabonis, 5. Luka, 6. AD, 7. Gobert, 8. Tatum.
If what you are arguing is that why isn't Luka talked about more? Do you want it to become a narrative derived award? Jokic should win this year, and he should have won last year if not for voter fatigue.
I'm not denying that narratives certainly play a factor in who will ultimately get the award, but this is about who is the MVP. And that's jokic, if the thunder finish first and there is enough voter fatigue it may be SGA. But both are closer in win shares and much higher than everyone else.
You know who's getting disrespected? Sabonis, he didn't even get an all star nod with the season he's having this year. Which you've pointed out.
I call it, his teams not great so he has lots of shots to take
More like when the league is complete garbage, no one cares about anyone in it anymore.