Greek Freak vs. The Beard
Settling the score for this NBA season’s MVP debate
What does it take to be an MVP? Is it the the player that brings the most value to their team? Someone who displays statistic and artistic splendor? A record-setting, crowd-rousing, show-running unicorn?
Voters all have their own methods, and criteria for determining who the title belongs to — amounting to some ambiguous blend of personal judgement, “eye-tests” and statistics. This subjectivity is the fuel behind the heated debates for the MVP title. Yet statistics alone also often fall short in describing how “good” a player is, considering the complex team dynamics in the sport.
But, since we’re stats people, we’ll try to apply some level of objectivity to this question and see what comes out the other end. Specifically, we want to look at the top two contenders, and determine their MVP-worthiness based on how well-rounded they are as players.
For our analysis, we use a modified version of Dean Oliver’s four factors of basketball success to evaluate players (adding defensive ability, assists, and volume statistics rather than only efficiency). The categories by which we’ll evaluate our two contenders are:
- Shooting well
- Helping teammates
- Getting the ball
- Keeping the Ball
- Not letting the opponent shoot well
I. Shooting Well
Winner: James Harden
Harden playing as a guard and Giannis playing as a forward translates to very different shooting styles. Harden shoots more 3-pointers, while Giannis lives up to his name as a “dunk lord”, taking more than 70% of his shots within 8 feet of the hoop.
Harden is a heavyweight point-producer, leading the league at a whopping 47.5 points per 100 possessions. Giannis’s 37.6 is the second highest in the league.
The blended offensive rating stat tilts slightly in Harden’s favor while Giannis wins in true shooting % (Giannis has a higher field goal percentage (FG%) while Harden is better at shooting free throws, and true shooting percentage takes both into account. Giannis’s higher FG% makes sense, because it’s easier to make baskets closer to the hoop, rather than try to make 3-pointers).
It’s a tight match, but Harden wins on the first category.
II. Helping Teammates
Winner: Giannis Antetokounmpo
It’s a bit tricky to compare assists between Harden and Giannis, since Harden has an advantage playing guard. So, here we opted to normalize their stats to the position that they play, by ranking their stat within players that play the same position.
For this category we picked assist percentage to account for player contribution to a team, assist ratio to measure pace-adjusted assists, and adjusted assist to pass percentage, which is an interesting assist efficiency metric that takes into account all assists, free throw assists, and secondary assists.
Although Harden’s raw assist stats are much better than Giannis’s, when ranked within players that play the same position, he actually gets edged out by Giannis. The difference is most stark when looking at assist ratio, where Giannis ranks in the 84th percentile among forwards while Harden ranks a low 38th percentile among guards.
And so, the second category slides to Giannis.
III. Getting the Ball
Winner: Giannis Antetokounmpo
Who’s better at “getting the ball”? Here, we look at two rebound-related statistics, rebounds per 100 possessions and adjusted rebound chance % — the first measures volume while the second measures efficiency.
Giannis is way ahead of James Harden in raw statistics, hitting it out of the park (so to speak) with 17.3 rebounds per 100 possessions compared to James Harden’s 8.5. Again, we normalize these numbers to playing positions since forwards tend to stack more rebounds. The difference is much less drastic but Giannis is still a clear winner on both of the statistics we picked.
IV. Keeping the Ball
Winner: Giannis Antetokounmpo
It’s a close one, but Giannis wins again. James Harden has more turnovers per 100 possessions than Giannis, and slightly less personal fouls per 100 possessions as Giannis.
Although the raw numbers look like a tie, the numbers tell a slightly different story when they’re normalized to the players’ respective positions. Harden and Giannis pretty much tie on turnovers but Giannis commits much less personal fouls compared to other forwards, than Harden compared to other Guards.
V. Not Letting the Opponent Shoot Well
Winner: Giannis Antetokounmpo
We chose block %, steal %, and defensive rating to assess defensive prowess (technically steals could belong the category of “getting the ball”, but we put it here because defensive rating uses steals in its calculation, we wanted categories to stay mutually exclusive).
Block % is an estimate of the percentage of opponent two-point field goal attempts blocked by the player while he was on the floor. Steal % is an estimate of the percentage of opponent possessions that end with a steal by the player while he was on the floor. We thought that these two statistics were a better measure of defensive skill than per-game or per-100-possession statistics.
Defensive rating is a compound metric that measures an individual player’s efficiency at preventing the other team from scoring points. Note that the higher the rating is, the worse the player is at defending.
Again, we rank the two players within players that play the same position for block% and steal%. But since the distribution of defensive rating is pretty similar for forwards and guards, we ranked all players together (but the results are the same, regardless).
Harden loses hard on defensive rating(cheesy pun unintended), which has slipped from last year’s 105.7. Yet he’s only slightly less efficient than Giannis at blocking shots (despite the blown-out poor reputation), and way more efficient than Giannis at stealing. Unfortunately this still amounts to a loss in this category for Harden.
Our MVP Verdict: Giannis Antetokounmpo
Although James Harden is an undisputed scoring machine (which of course plays hugely into winning), Giannis seems to be a more well-rounded player. Not to mention that he’s also pretty damn good at scoring (placing second in the league in points per 100 possessions, after James Harden).
Note 1: Anticipating potential criticism over how we normalized each player’s stats to the positions that they play (since Giannis is a pretty versatile player), we also looked at how the two players compare when their stats are not normalized. In this case, Giannis loses in the “assists” category and ties in the “keeping ball” category, which brings our MVP assessment to a tie.
Note 2: Data was pulled as of March 27th, 2019 for this article, so may be slightly off from current numbers.
This article is written by one of the co-founders of Torneo. At Torneo, we combine design principles, interactivity, and advanced analytics to bring meaningful sports insights to sports enthusiasts and professionals.
Feel free to reach out to us at cathy@torneo.ca for collaborations on data viz/ data analysis.
