I agree. Both are deserving. Ignoring who won it in previous years, I would probably lean towards Jokic. Playoffs shouldn't matter. Voting has already completed before the playoffs started, I believe.
It's too easy to get caught up in recency bias - Embiid's team is up 3-0 while Jokic's team is down 0-2. If news broke this morning that Jokic won MVP, it would leave a bitter taste in peoples' mouths. But like you two said, the MVP is a regular season award, and if records and box score stats are mostly the same, it comes down to nitpicking. And Jokic has better "nitpicking" stats. Also, people should realize that a banged up Toronto team is not a fully healthy GS team. Not even close. I doubt Philly would do this well against Golden State, and I doubt Denver would do this poorly against Toronto.
I just think it should’ve went to Embiid…dominant on both ends and had the better team Embiid was leading the race at the ASB and then Harden, who everyone thinks is washed, starting playing and all of the sudden it became a landslide in Jokic’s favor
Looks like Joel has another gear and Jokic doesn't. The Nuggets beat up on bad competition and struggled against good competition. The media should have had some foresight and know if they're going to vote for the MVP on a 6th seed, they're likely going to lose in the first round and look foolish, whether it's fair or not.
and who is on jokic's team? Who is their 2nd best player? 3rd best player? 4th best player? Jokic took a 15-20 win team to 48 wins, it is easily one of the most impressive things i have EVER seen in my life as a basketball fan. Probably only Lebron is the only one capable of doing something like this.
That reasoning is more about the team, though, and not about the individual player. And along those lines, it's not as though Philly has the "best player on the best team in the EC" argument either. The two teams were only 3 wins apart - it's not like a "Westbrook's 47 wins to Harden's 55" debacle, way back when. The argument would be louder for Embiid / quieter for Jokic if there was a huge discrepancy. But you couple all the factors together (Jokic's advanced stats, no Murray/MPJ, etc) and it's tough to vote against Jokic, even though Embiid had a great season, himself. Also, if I math'd right, 22 of Philly's 31 losses were against playoff teams and 25 of the Nuggets 34 losses were against playoff teams. There's not a huge difference there. I think every team is going to beat up on bad competition and struggle against good competition. That's just the nature of basketball.
The Eastern Conference is tougher overall, and the Atlantic Division is probably the most competitive. Denver had two tanking teams in their division they played a total of 8 times (OKC and Portland)
They need to retire the MVP award. It’s been sullied and turned into a joke by the media figures that get to vote. Just bring back the IBM award from the 1990’s. It was an award given to a player based on some computer formula. They won a laptop or something. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Award
The issue is that Giannis was never really in the conversation from the start of the season. As a result, he had an uphill climb to even be in the top 3 discussion.
Meh, at least it reinforces is a regular season award. Not sure why playoffs matter at all, but I know we can't seem to separate that out because of when awards are handed out.
Westbrook and Jokic leading teams that aren’t even a factor, but then getting handed MVPs…Jokic B2B at that
An award based on some computer formula would feel pretty empty. M And, anyway, most advanced metrics had Jokic as the number 1 guy this year.
Jokic and Embiid both had a strong claim to the award. I would have voted Jokic as 1A and Embiid as 1B. And yes, it is a regular season award.
The Nuggets were +444 when he was on the floor and -255 when he was off this season. it's actually pretty impressive he got a game off of GS in the opening round.
