Ballot
1st: Joel Embiid
2nd: Nikola Jokic
3rd: Giannis Antetokounmpo
4th: Shai Gilgeous-Alexander
5th: Jayson Tatum
Jokic and Embiid have been in a neck and neck race for MVP the entire season and really the past three seasons. Like any conversation we revisit and debate over and over again people have gotten so bored that it has become divisive and just plain toxic. Lots of people have been looking for an escape from the near race war that has become Jokic and Embiid. With both the Sixers and Nuggets having slow finishes to the season there is an ever increasing threat that Giannis might be able to swoop in and steal the MVP bu it would be a mistake for Giannis to win.
Why Not Giannis?
Giannis is having a down season for himself in a bunch of different parts of his game. He has the second lowest FT% of his career, his worst 3P% in his last 4 seasons, the lowest blocks per game since his rookie season and the worst TS% in his last 5 seasons. Now these stats are semi-cherry picked and no individual counting stats really speak to a player’s overall production. That said, the advanced stats tell a similar story, that Giannis is behind Jokic and Embiid. Additionally, Giannis’ team will not have won a meaningfully greater amount of games than the other two and he will have done it with a clearly better supporting cast. It just feels odd to me that Jokic and Embiid have brought their production up this year while Giannis’ production is arguably down and that Giannis will win the MVP. But look, if you want to vote for the ‘best player in the league’ on the odds on champion favorites, I can’t hate on you.
In fact, I went back and looked at all the times the ‘best player in the league’ had the best record and this would be one of the first times that guy has NOT won the MVP. That said, this was the first time in a year with a full season since 2000, that the team with the best record did not have 60 wins, the Bucks had 58. I guess if the Bucks were at like 62 wins this argument probably would have compelled me but no one really ran away with this regular season so it feels odd to give to Giannis just on that premise.
Jokic Vs. Embiid
Now that we got the Giannis thing out of the way, let’s dive into the toxic debate, Jokic vs Embiid. There are few common arguments that I have been hearing in the debate that I think need to be tossed aside.
First, the MVP is a regular season award, I could care less about how these guys have fared in the playoffs. The award is about who has the greatest production for a really good team this season. It is not ‘who would you pick first in a draft of all players’ award, it’s about a player’s performance within a given season.
Leading me to my second point, I do not care about Jokic winning the award the last two seasons or that Embiid has not won it. The award should be evaluated within the vacuum of a given season. If we want to think of it about Jokic winning it three years in a row then we should have the 3x MVP award, which sounds dumb and is why we don’t have it. I don’t need any of these arguments, which forecast the playoffs and look at past winners, to compel me that Embiid is the MVP.
My 3 Reasons
Reason 1: Physical Dominance
I was lucky enough to attend a bunch of Nets games this year and I got to see Embiid, Jokic and Giannis in person. Embiid was physically dominant and unstoppable in a way that the other two were not. Not only did Embiid just have the physical dominance to destroy the Nets, he had a bag of tricks and counters that made it impossible to stop him.
That said, the Nuggets and Bucks, much to the credit of Jokic and Giannis, cruised past the Nets and didn’t really have to try in the games I watched. Both Jokic and Giannis cruised to amazing statlines and never really had to lift a finger. Sure, it might be kind of dumb to stake a lot of my decision on 1 game from each of these players but there are so many things that you pick up actually being at a game that you don’t when watching on TV. The athleticism and physicality required to play the game becomes so much more clear when you attend in person, it’s worth something, especially in context of all the other games of these players I have watched.
Embiid approached the game with an aggressive and dominant mentality that I did not see from Jokic and Giannis. A fan who knew nothing about the MVP conversation but got the chance to see all three play the Nets would clearly have told you Embiid was the best player this season, I value that.
Reason 2: Defense
Joel Embiid is clearly a much better defender than Jokic. Look, I am a vorps and shnorps enjoyer but when you look at these stats closely, it is super clear that the defensive advanced stats are deeply flawed and way behind offensive stats. For example, defensive box plus minus does not actually measure defense, it just | total box plus minus | – | offensive box plus minus | meaning that a player’s offensive stats factor into their “defensive box plus minus”. In other words, I think most advanced defensive stats can be thrown out while I find the offensive ones to still be useful and insightful.
At the end of the day, centers have three main buckets of defense that they need to be able to thrive in: post-defense, rim protection and switching onto smaller players. Jokic is a good post defender and average at the VERY best in rim protection and switchability. Meanwhile, Embiid is as good or better in the post, he is one of the best rim protectors in the league and has much better foot speed than Jokic.
The tracking stats, which measure things like what does an opponent shoot when x player is the closest defender, also back this up. ESPN’s Kirk Goldsberry recently wrote an incredible article breaking down how the tracking stats show that Jokic is far from a good defender, here are some highlights:
- “Per NBA Advanced Stats, 33 players have defended 300 shots at the rim this season. Jokic has allowed the highest field goal percentage (69.0%) on those attempts among this group” (Embiid, for comparison, is at 61%).
- “Opponents have shot 54.2% on layups and dunks when Jokic is the contesting defender AND he heavily contests the shot, per Second Spectrum tracking. That ranks 64th among 65 players to heavily contest 250 layups and dunks this season.”
- “226 players have defended ball handlers on at least 200 drives this season (that’s almost half of the league), but among this massive group Jokic ranks 222nd in efficiency, allowing 1.16 points per chance.”
The tracking stats, which just use computer vision to keep track of this instead of someone doing it by hand, show that Jokic is not an average defender, the tracking stats show he is one of the worst defenders in the league. Even if you don’t love this way of viewing things, it’s clear that the gap between the two on defense is the difference between average (at best) and elite.
Reason 3: Volume matters
Embiid is the leading scorer this season with over 33 points per game and he is doing it on the best efficiency of his entire career, with a true shooting percentage of 65%. Since 2000 (as far as I cared to go back), the only player to ever win the scoring title and have a higher true shooting percentage than Embiid this season was Steph Curry in 2016 when he won the unanimous MVP. Oh and did I mention that Embiid is scoring 3 more points per game than Steph did that season? In fact, since 2000, Harden and Kobe are the only players to ever score more points per game and win the scoring title. Here is all that information in a graph:
Now the Jokic fan will remark that Jokic has an absolutely insane 70% TS and is doing it on a hefty 25 points a game. What Jokic is doing is insane but it’s clear that part of the reason Jokic’s efficiency is so high is due to his lack of volume. The last two seasons, when Jokic won MVP, he was at 26.5 and 27 PPG. In those seasons, where he had greater volume, his true shooting percentage was lower 65% (26.5PPG) and 66% (27PPG). This may sound like blah blah blah numbers but let’s put Jokic from this season on that graph of scoring title champions. It becomes blatantly obvious that the more you shoot, the lower your true shooting percentage.
There are two ways of reading this graph, either that Jokic is having a completely anomalous season like nothing we have ever seen in NBA history and he should therefore win MVP. Or you can read this graph as showing that it would be close to impossible to imagine Jokic would be as efficient if he was scoring 30 points per game, still far off from Embiid’s 33.
This also adds up with conventional basketball logic, if a player only shoots the ball when they are wide open they are going to have better efficiency than if they also take contested jumpers. Making arguments about Jokic’s efficiency without also talking about volume is incredibly flawed and I hope these charts demonstrate that. In short, not only is Embiid having one of the best scoring seasons ever but also his efficiency is only topped by unanimous MVP Steph Curry.
Answering the Jokic Arguments
If Embiid wins the eye test, is a better defender and a superior scorer then how could Jokic be ahead of Embiid? Jokic would need to be lapping Embiid in one or more of the following categories: team wins, having a worse supporting cast, games played, rebounding, playmaking and advanced stats.
- As of writing this, the Sixers and Nuggets are within one game of each other and both have a good but semi-flawed supporting cast around them.
- Jokic has only played 3 more games than Embiid at the time of writing this, not a meaningful difference.
- Jokic has 2 more rebounds per game and one more offensive rebound per game, which is worth something, but ultimately not a meaningful difference in their rebounding ability. A viewer would never watch them play and notice rebounding as a difference between them.
- Jokic is lapping Embiid in playmaking and advanced stats, so let’s talk about it.
Jokic’s Advanced Stats and Playmaking
The Jokic MVP voter will of course point to his insane playmaking and leaps and bounds better advanced numbers. It’s not really up for debate that Jokic is a better playmaker and passer than Embiid. Jokic is the best passing big man that I have ever seen and I think I will ever see. That said, do we ever really consider the difference of 5-6 assists per game to be what separates MVP guards from forwards? When Steph Curry won his MVPs on 6-7 assists did we really care that Westbrook and CP3 were at 10+ assists per game? No, and we shouldn’t have. In my view, the difference between 10 assists and 5 assists is meaningful but not as meaningful as the difference between 1 assist and 6 assists.
If a voter wants to pick Jokic over Embiid because of playmaking, I can respect that, but I have a hard time picking playmaking over scoring and defense.
‘But Jokic is also leaps and bounds better in advanced stats!’
But readers must understand that the main reason Jokic is ahead in many advanced stats is due to inherent flaws in the way many advanced stats are calculated.
Let’s take a look at a popular advanced stat, Box Plus Minus. The idea of the stat is to use box score stats that everyone has access to and condense them into one number that shows a players total value added to the court, sounds great. Currently, Embiid’s BPM is 8.9 (3rd overall) meaning the Sixers score 8.9 more points per 100 possessions when he is on the floor. Meanwhile Jokic is first with a bullet at a staggering 13.3 BPM. When you read that, it’s shocking that the difference between Jokic (1st) and Embiid (3rd) is the same as the difference between 3rd and 20th (Devin Booker).
But if you actually study how the sausage is made you will quickly learn that this difference is meaningless. BPM assigns players their value based on positional coefficients. So, for example, a point guard getting a block adds more to that player’s BPM than if they were a center, which makes some sense. If, for example, there was a 6 foot PG getting 2 blocks a game that would be more impressive than a 7 footer doing the same. That said, it also means that assists count for more for centers. Jokic is a BPM monster because he is a center who gets a ton of assists. Given how Jokic plays the game, I don’t think his getting assists is more valuable than how CP3 or LeBron do it. In other words, Jokic only has a much better BPM than Embiid because BPM gives centers a multiplier for getting assists, which is kinda dumb.
‘But wait! Jokic’s VORP is 8.8 and Embiid’s is 6.1! GOTCHA JOKIC HATER!’
Guess what, VORP is just a conversion of BPM! So the exact same critique of positional production applies. I’m not sure why having the letter “C” next to Jokic’s name should give him additional value. I wish I knew a data science god who could go through BPM and recreate it where the coefficient for assists was the same for centers as it is for point guards; it would certainly reduce the gap between Jokic and Embiid and I bet it might also mean Embiid would be ahead of Jokic in BPM and VORP.
Look, pretty much every advanced stat has Jokic in front of Embiid but I’m not sure how meaningful those stats are in this context. I won’t go through every advanced stat and write a full critique but I will quickly examine Win Shares and RAPTOR, two other really popular advanced stats. Amongst a number of factors, Win Shares makes a comparison from how a team performs with and without a given player on the court. The Nuggets are a nightmare without Jokic which inflates his Win Shares. Now the Nuggets suck without Jokic because he is awesome, Deandre ‘how is he still in the league’ Jordan is his back up and all teams with a ‘heliocentric’ style tend to crater when their star rests (see: Harden no CP3 Rockets, Westbrook no KD Thunder, Luka’s Mavs). Is Jokic better than Embiid because Maxey and Harden can run a competent offense without Embiid while Michael Porter Jr. and Jamal Murray cannot without Jokic? I’m not so sold.
RAPTOR does about a million things, it looks at on/off, tracking data, box score, you name it and RAPTOR does it. I like RAPTOR and tend to think its the best of this bunch but I will just leave you with this– RAPTOR has Josh Hart as a top 50 player and Deandre Ayton in the 200s. If you think that stat alone means Hart is a much better player than Ayton then I don’t think you are using the right tools to understand basketball. If you think Jokic’s RAPTOR means he is better than Embiid then I also don’t think you are using the right tools.
Pick Your Prosper?
Everyone has heard the phrase “pick your poison” when faced with making the choice between two bad options but we don’t have a phrase for the opposite– when you are left with two amazing choices. In the off chance that we get this type of wonderful situation, where we must make a backbreaking choice between two wonderful options, I propose we call this ‘picking our prosper’. It was such a shame that two absolutely stunning basketball performances turned into a toxic conversation that at times descended into a race war, the lowest form of basketball fandom. Cheers to Jokic and Embiid (and Giannis)!
The Reedbound 