NBA Most Valuable Player (MVP) Award.
A closer look at MVP candidates over the past 20 years and our take on who will win the NBA 2020 MVP
Introduction
Question: How do we determine who is the most valuable player (MVP) in the NBA?
Is the NBA MVP the most outstanding player? Or is it the best player on the best team? Perhaps the criteria for MVP changes year by year? Today we will analyze the last 20 years of NBA regular season statistics to figure out what makes an MVP. Then see which MVP had the best season and who will win the NBA 2019–20 MVP award.
One thing that’s often mentioned in MVP discussions is the “narrative” of each player and how that “narrative” either helps or hurts them. This blog post won’t dive into narratives but will highlight any interesting trends or outliers that were discovered during the analysis. Let’s celebrate some of the amazing performances over the last 20 years. The last section will go over who we believe will be the 2019–20 MVP.
R was used to web scrap information from https://www.basketball-reference.com/awards/awards_2019.html . Then cleaned the data, joined some tables, did a bit of feature engineering and created some visualizations.
Please find all the code for that in the link below.
Just want to state that basketball reference have changed the way they present standings, so the webscrapping portion of this blog won’t completely work. The Seed column will be empty. Sorry for any inconveniences this may cause
Most Valuable Player (MVP) in NBA
The NBA’s MVP award has been around since the 1955–56 NBA season. As the name alludes to it’s awarded to the “most valuable” NBA player during the regular season. The award is decided by a panel of sportswriters and broadcasters. Each voter gets 5 votes (1st — 5th place), and each place is awarded different points. The NBA player with the most points from the voters wins the award.
It’s easier to understand how the points are totalled by looking at last year’s results. Last years voting results are in the link below:
Summary Statistics
Typically, there are around 15 players that get MVP votes each season. The below visualizations show summary statistics of the MVP candidates by season. Each visualization will show a different statistic.
Hopefully, the visualizations will give you a better understanding of what “elite” (MVP candidates) players were producing during each season. Labels were added to each plot to identify extreme outliers. Comparing season by season to see if MVP candidates are trending in certain stats.
The middle line in each box is the median or the “middle” values of each group (Year).
The first summary statistic is the Points Per Game (PPG) of MVP candidates from the 1999–00 season to the 2018–19 season. The labels are for any MVP candidates who averaged less than 10 ppg or more than 35 ppg.
- If you include the 2019–20 season, then James Harden will be the scoring champ for three years straight.
- One thing I noticed for stats summary is that over the past 3 years there seems to be an increase in the median for PPG by MVP candidates.
The second summary statistic is Rebounds Per Game (RPG). This includes both offensive and defensive rebounds. The labelled players are for MVP candidates who averaged more than 14 rebounds per game in a season.
The third summary statistic is Assists Per Game (APG). The labelled players are for MVP candidates who averaged more than 11 assists per game in a season.
Instead of diving straight into the last boxplot, which is for Player Efficiency Rating (PER), let’s go over what the statistic is and why it’s so popular nowadays. The player efficiency rating (PER) is a rating of a player’s per-minute productivity. Two important things to remember about PER are that it’s per-minute and is pace-adjusted. The Player Efficiency Rating (PER) was developed by ESPN.com columnist John Hollinger.
Hollinger explains, “The PER sums up all a player’s positive accomplishments, subtracts the negative accomplishments, and returns a per-minute rating of a player’s performance.”
The final summary statistic is Player Efficiency Rating (PER). The labelled players are for MVP candidates with either above a 31 PER or below 17 PER. As you can see Lebron James and Steph Curry are the only MVP candidates who have recorded seasons with a PER above 31. These four instances lead to four MVPs.
On the opposite end, three players recorded a PER below 17, which would land them in the “Third offensive option” to “Slightly above-average player” range.
NBA MVPs from 2000 to 2019
The table above lists the previous 20 NBA MVPs with their regular season statistics. This table can be a bit overwhelming but the table is a good reference point for our following section. The next section will examine what makes an MVP and if there are common statistical achievements that lead to an NBA MVP. One important statistic to point out is the Seed column. There have been 5 MVPs that weren’t a 1 seed. (Duncan ’02, Nash ’06, Lebron ’12, Durant ’14 and Westbrook ‘17).
Each Colour is a Player (see the legend on right side of graphic). The X-axis is the Year and the Y-axis is the statistic Value. There are 9 different statistics being shown.
From the visualization above can we identify any trends?
- Blocks were an early 2000s thing
- True Shooting and amount of Wins seem to be relatively constant
- Anything else stands out to you?
The table on the left shows how many times an MVP also lead in each statistic when compared to other MVP candidates. Again, this only ranks them against other MVP candidates (there are ~15 a year)
Out of the last 20 years, the MVP has lead the MVP candidates in Win Shares 12 times, Total Wins 12 times and PER 11 times. Only 7 times has the MVP been the player who also scored the most when compared to other MVP candidates. Leading in True Shooting, Rebounds, Assists and Steals doesn’t seem to be common amongst the MVPs. Lastly, not once has the MVP lead the rest of the MVP candidates in Blocks per game.
It’s often mentioned that the MVP is the best player on the best team. The top row is “Wins_Rank”, which takes the entire NBA’s win/lose records and ranks them by which team has the most wins. This is instead of taking the MVP’s Seed (since there’s 2 of each, 1 in both the East & West). Of the 20 MVPs, 12 of them lead the team with the most wins during the regular season.
Since 2000, only 6 players have won MVP and the Scoring Title during the same regular season. This includes Shaq (‘00), Allen Iverson (‘01), Kevin Durant (‘14), Steph Curry (‘16), Russell Westbrook (‘17), and James Harden (‘18)
Since 2009 the MVP has been the player with the highest PER 9 out of 11 times. The two years the MVP didn’t have the highest PER he was on the team with the most wins. (see below)
Compare that to the 2000–2008 MVPs, and you will see that the criteria for MVP have drastically changed.
Personally, I feel that this trend is the most insightful piece of information in the entire blog.
The two charts above are just a deeper dive into the MVP chart which was introduced a few paragraphs up.
*Giannis is 1st in both PER and team wins for the 2019–20 season.
A King of Kings
Over the past two decades, there have been some amazing MVP seasons. Here’s a table of the past 20 MVPs. In this table, there are the stats of each player, followed by columns of those stats ranked. This is the same table we saw before, but instead of using the actual numbers, we have ranked them.
- Dark Red = Best
- White = Middle of the pack
- Dark Blue = Worst
Just in case it’s unclear — the first row is Shaq in 2000. When compared to the other MVPs he scored the 6th most points, had 2nd most Rebounds, had the 18th most Assists Per Game (haha only Duncan & Dirk had fewer APG than Shaq) etc…
It’s clear some columns are more important than others. I’m sure you wouldn’t argue the best MVP season is the one with the player with the highest blocks per game & steals per game. Let’s go through different iterations of ranked stats.
Is the best MVP season the one with the highest PPG and most team Wins?
Or do you think it is the season a player recorded the highest PPG, RPG, APG, SPG and BPG?
Or is the best MVP season the player who had the best Win Share and PER?
As you can see there’s no perfect answer for which player had the best MVP season over the last 20 years. No statistic or set of statistic should be considered a conclusion. Rather they should be considered a collection of metrics.
If you want to mess around and create your own criteria, then head to the GitHub link at the beginning of the blog and look at the “king.xlsx”. Alternatively, you can look at “final.r” for the code which produced the statistics behind the visualizations.
Predicting the 2020 MVP
Basketball-Reference created an NBA MVP tracker list. It does not represent the opinion of this site. Rather, these are the players that the voters are likely to target (max two players per team).
Please keep in mind that these statistics were uploaded during early June and may change as time goes on.
The NBA season is typically 82 games. We wanted to predict how many wins each candidate might have had if the season wasn’t cut short. It’s understood that this isn’t a perfect estimation but still felt the approach lead to a justifiable alternative. Look at the column 82 games for that number.
- PER — range from 17.9 to 31.6
- Minute Per Game — No one above 37 MPG
- PTS — James Harden averaging 34.4
- Prob% — Current probability (likelihood) of winning MVP
While Seed isn’t included in this table it’s interesting to note:
- That 3 out of the top 5 MVP candidates are number 1 seeds.
— Giannis, Lebron and AD. - The top 3 MVP candidates are all former MVPs.
— Giannis, Lebron and Harden
Machine Learning Predictions Models
The Machine Learning process of this analysis can be found in the link below.
https://medium.com/@deeganrobbie/applying-machine-learning-algorithms-to-nba-mvp-data-e4470a531338
We felt that the analysis was more valuable in a separate blog that can be read by a different target audience. This blog was written for a target audience interested in basketball statistics.
Our 2020 NBA MVP Prediction
Here is why we believe Giannis will win MVP.
- Antetokounmpo is the best player on the team with the best record.
- He leads the league in PER
- He’s tied for 3rd in PPG in the entire NBA but is playing 6 fewer minutes per game than the two players averaging more PPG than him (James Harden & Bradley Beal).
- He’s also tied for 3rd in rebounds per game in the entire NBA.
- He is a top 2 Defensive Player Of the Year candidate.
*This analysis was done for pre-bubble statistics !!
