An Historically-Proven Simple Formula to Determine the NBA MVP
The voters have more common sense than you think.
Every year when the NBA season begins, sports-talk pundits start discussing who will be the league's regular-season Most Valuable Player (MVP). As the season progresses and a few players really stand out, the discussion becomes philosophical:
Do we give the MVP to the best player, that is, the first player we'd choose if we were to start a team?
Do we reward a player with an outstanding statistical achievement?
Do we give it to a player whose team wouldn't be nearly as good without him?
These debates ultimately go nowhere, and I started wondering if there is a hidden logic behind how NBA voters actually vote.
I thought about two players and two of their best seasons. Each led the league in John Hollinger's Player Efficiency Ratio (PER), and had no teammate who were First, Second, or Third-Team All-NBA or an All-Star. In other words, they were very valuable - indispensable - to their teams.
Anthony Davis, 2015 30.8 PER, Pelicans win 45 games
Lebron James, 2010, 31.1 PER, Cavaliers win 61 games
James won the MVP, and Davis did not, because wins matter in MVP voting.
Based largely on general impressions, I thought of three primary factors in determining the MVP:
Number of games won in which the player played.
Ratio of games won in which the player played (Player Wins, or PW) to the total number of games won by the team (Team Wins, or TW). For instance, if Player A plays in all 60 (100%) of his team's wins, and Player B plays in 58 of his team's 64 wins (90.63%), then Player A has the MVP advantage even though Player B might be the best player on the best team.
The player has the highest PER on his own team, suggesting he's the team's best player. PER a flawed statistic, but it may be the best we have.
From these factors, I developed Wilson's Simple MVP Formula: 100 (PW/TW) + PW + PER.
For example, let's take Kevin Durant's 2014 season. He played in 58 of the Thunder's 59 victories. His PER was 29.8.
100 (58/59) + 58 + 29.8 = 185.21
This led the league, and Durant was MVP.
I went through the top 5 MVP vote-getters for each of the previous 20 seasons (2001-2020). The players with the highest score according to this formula was MVP 15 of those seasons. They came in second four times, and third once.
Here are the years in which they did not win the MVP:
2001: Allen Iverson won the MVP. He led the league in points per game and his 76ers finished first in the East. Advanced statistics like PER were not well-known and did not come into fashion until the 2010s. Tim Duncan, who led the league in my formula, finished third.
2006: Steve Nash repeated as MVP. Dirk Nowitzki, who led in my formula, finished second. Dirk won more games and his PER was substantially higher. I've heard many people say that Dirk was robbed.
2008: Kobe Bryant (182.20 points) won the MVP over Chris Paul.(182,51 points), who came in second. Kobe's edge in victories and Paul's edge in PER led to essentially a tie according to my formula.
2013: Lebron James wins over Kevin Durant, who edged him out in my formula. James did win more games and had a higher PER, but Durant played in 100% of the Thunder's 60 wins whereas James played in 61 of the Heat's 66 wins. Durant finished second.
2017: Russell Westbrook wins the MVP on the strength of averaging a "triple double" (10+ points, 10+ assists, 10+ rebounds), a feat not seen since Oscar Robertson's 1962 season. Westbrook did lead the league in PER as well, but James Harden, who finished second, won several more games and finished first in my formula.
Most years, NBA voters fell in line with my formula, even if they were never consciously doing so. (How could they? I just made it up this past weekend.) I think they used their common sense even if they couldn't explain their reasoning. I believe the formula is at least a sensible starting point in choosing the MVP.
I do suspect there's another stat line aside from PER that could determine “best player” and explain MVP votes even more accurately. It is a statistic I'm creating. Details to come.
James Leroy Wilson writes from Nebraska. Follow him on Facebook and Twitter. If you find value in his articles, your support through Paypal helps keep him going. Permission to reprint is granted with attribution. You may contact him for your writing, editing, and research needs: jamesleroywilson-at-gmail.com.