Im fine with them giving it to Westbrook or Harden. They are both amazing players having historical seasons. Its too bad neither team has a legitimate shot this year. I envision an NBA where teams are structured like the Rockets or Thunder. Give Westbrook his own team, Harden, Durant, Curry, Klay, Lebron. Spread this talent out maybe create a max elo score for teams so they can't have too many top tier players. These super teams make the NBA so boring. I feel like only people that love drama can follow this crap all year long.
If you're going to discredit Westbrook's numbers you have to discredit Harden's for the same reasons. What Westbrook is doing is incredible, as is what Harden's doing. Both are absolutely deserving of the MVP.
Their pure volume stats are inflated to some degree. But the difference is Harden's team is a 3rd seed and Westbrook's team is a 7th seed. Our role players are better offensively, but OKC has a better defensive supporting cast. I just think one cannot overlook the fact that Houston is 8 games ahead of OKC, because the talent gap is certainly not that big.
I agree, if Harden lost to Curry due to record (with better numbers) and then he were to lose to Westbrook due to numbers (with a better record) it would be hard to argue that there's no media bias against him.
The last time Cuban rooted against someone, he became president. Hopefully Cuban's non-endorsement doesn't cause Westbrook to win the MVP.
I'm ok with giving Westbrook the MVP if he really averages a triple double. I mean who would have thought it was possible even at the start of the year?
LOL what do you mean same reasons? Fact 1: Harden TS%: 0.615 Westbrick TS%: 0.545 Fact 2: Rox seed: 3rd Thunder seed: 7th Fact 3: Harden Usage rate: 34% Westbrick usage rate: 42% (wtf 15 players on the court and he has the ball 42% of the time) To be honest everyone who thinks Westbrick is doing an amazing job this year and could be an MVP needs to reassess how they analyze player performance in the NBA. Is Westbrick objectively a good player? Yes. But he's not anywhere as good as his average states, it's just a result of stat padding, the higher pace of today's NBA and Westbrick's legendary usage rate. First of all is TS%. TS measures how efficient you are with scoring every time you use up a possession. Well as we can see Harden deserves to have a high usage rate, if you give him the ball he will get you a point 62% of the time which is actually pretty good. OTH, Wesbtrick scores a mediocre 55%, that's only average so why is his shot attempts so high then? It's not like OKC is lacking in scorers, Oladipo, Steven Adams and even Kanter have been known to be competent scorers but why is Westbrick taking so many bad shots when he's not converting? Second is the usage rating. Westbrick is getting so many pts and assists because he is using the ball at a record breaking rate, when 42% of the time the ball is in your hands do you think you will have only a few assists? Harden gets his assists but that's because he and Gordon are the only two guys who can create their own shot. OKC oth have Oladipo and a couple of others who can generate shots so again why is Westbrick monopolizing the ball? Finally, there is the record. Being a ball hog or using up all the ball isn't a bad thing if you can convert, I mean when the Bulls were in the Jordan era 70% of the time it went to MJ, 20% it went to Pippen, and then 10% to the rest of the Bulls. But there wasn't a problem with that because MJ would deliver every time you give him the ball. Westbrick is different, last season when he monopolized the ball OKC missed the playoffs and this year they are scraping by at the 7th seed. It's ok for Harden to dominate the ball because he casues the Rockets to win games and get the 3rd seed. OKC oth is losing games because Westbrick takes too many shots and misses a lot of them also.
Btw Remember when Evans averaged 20-5-5 as a rookie? It was something no rookie has ever done since Lebron! If it was that easy to get 20-5-5 as a rookie how come only 4 rookies has done it in the history of the NBA? Just expand the scale of the stat padding Sacramento did and you will have Westbrick in OKC, a guy who doesn't score at an elite pace getting record breaking usage rates and shot attempts.
He will burn himself out stat chasing and barely making the playoffs just like Tmac did winning scoring titles in Orlando and Kobe’s scoring runs in 2006. At age 28 and with Durant’s departure this is his “all in” season to show everyone that he is an elite individual player. I’m willing to bet he won’t be able to continue this production for consecutive seasons.
I wish they recorded USG% since the 50s. Would love to see how much USG someone like Oscar(Westbrook chasing him) or Tiny(Harden chasing him) got. I'm fairly confident Harden's usage is less than all of them. Somehow, and of course bias might be part of it even though I haven't been the biggest Harden fan, but I'd be more impressed by Harden leading the league in scoring and assists while leading a top 3 team(Tiny did it on a garbage team) over Westbrooks triple double stat padding on a mediocre team record(Oscar also did it on a mediocre team record IIRC) when his team was projected to be much better by the so called experts who now want to say Harden has more help. Harden doing it would be more impressive than all of them.
The last player to average 30 points and 10 rebounds in a season was Karl Malone in 1990. What he is doing is pretty freaking impressive.
