James Harden is gonna get screwed over again in MVP Voting

Rustled alright....

 

Of the 27 ESPN NBA writers, only 4 voted for James Harden.

It's going to be a blow out. At this point there is a better chance Harden finishes 3rd than 1st in my opinion. There will be ballots that are Westbrook/Kawhi/Harden and others where they put Curry in front of him.

Harden has the same number of ESPN votes as Kawhi (4). Trounced.

 

Yeah Harden is not winning this. It wont even be close.

 

Harden will finish ahead of Kawhi on the strength of more 2nd place to 3rd place votes. But, yeah Westbrook is getting those 1sts. ESPN echo chamber doing what they want.

 

I guess Harden will have a better chance next year. Kawhi will probably be the media's pick heading into next year, and his narrative won't be as tough to beat as Westbrook's although it will still be hard to beat him.

 

If Harden and Westbrook switched positions, Westbrook would still win.

People would say tri-dubs are great, but
- some rebounds are cheap
- Haren still playing no defense, he barely contests shots
- Thunder are 8 games better
- 55 wins and a 3 seed after Durant leaves!!
- no MVP has been lower than a 4 seed
- Oscar didn't win

There was little chance entering the season anyone not named Russell would win.

A caller called a national show and asked if Westbrook would be unanimous. Lmao and smh

 

Which will make it very confusing when she ultimately votes for Westbrook. If Harden is the stats MVP and his team is also better than WTF is left? She makes it sound like she's thinking but she rode Westbrook all year, I can't imagine that changing.

 

Nope, wrong again. If all games are equal then we can look at the number of games that each participated in and how many were won or loss, period. we don't care about games that neither appeared in. assuming a minimum number and relatively close total it's a simple w-l for games participated in.

 

That's why our team has a better record than OKC. All those media call WB run into the pain and take away those Reb from their Bigs "Play with Passion". It is really a "Stat Chasing" to me. I know WB has made a lot of clutch shots during the season to win the game. But...COME ON, all those clutch shots are against the weaker teams (Mavs? Magics? Nuggets? None of those is a playoff team), you need to play behind the score to these teams first in order to get the opportunity to make the clutch shots. Sorry to James, his team is just TOO GOOD that he barely get a chance to show the world how clutch he is.

 

I don't think Westbrook is that undeserving of an MVP. Like with 2015, I'm happy to say that I would pick Harden but it honestly is close.

But 4/27 of the vote is absolutely absurd. The fact that these schmucks shape public opinion about basketball is such a sad thing.

 

You can blame the media all you want, but I'm pretty sure the players are also going to vote Westbrook as the MVP of the league. Harden's poor late season performance lost him bunch of votes big time.

 

If your on an actual espn show like Beadle you should not have a vote.

I get espn is the world wide leader there going to get votes but talking heads who influence the masses should never have a vote because quite frankly they don't even watch most of these games they have to much going on with there tv gig.

The writers who watch and dig up the data I have no problem giving votes to even if they work at espn, because if I was in there shoes I would want to work at espn over anywhere else also.

But cmon the known Spurs homer has a vote and duh if your a Spurs fan your not giving anyone from houston or Dallas any love. It's just very flawed that of all ppl on NBA countdown she was the one given a vote.

 

Honestly I don't think it would have mattered. Sombody said it early somewhere on the radio.

The rockets and Spurs have known there seeding for over a month okc had something to play for and ultimately with all there late game heroics they still stayed in 6th.

What that tells me is that Russ was winning no matter what because we're penalizing harden and KL who imo are the real number one and two MVP candidates going off of past history for basically elevating there team to higher places and not having to play for anything the last two weeks of the season.

I mean if we want to go on past two
Weeks okc played both teams and what do you know Russ and okc lost both. The thunder outside of having entertaining games and Russ making individual history actually didn't play well at all.

So basically this is the first year in forever that winning doesn't matter apparently and it's all about the stats.

 

Some of y'all seem surprised at how this is playing out.

 

I'm a little surprised at how much Westbrook is winning as of now.

 

Yeah, the sad part is Harden gonna lose out the regular MVP voting and the player MVP voting For sure most of the players besides Curry will vote for WB, as they consider the difficulty of avging the triple double first

 

I didnt have an issue with Curry winning in 2015 and I dont have an issue with Westbrook this season, but the vote back in 2015 was a landslide for Curry despite everyone thinking it would be somewhat close. Curry had 100 first place to Harden's 25. I expect the same this year. ESPN basically selects the MVP based on what sells for them or what they can make sell easily. Harden's game doesnt really translate well to highlights. He doesnt really dunk the ball, he doesnt have crazy passes or threes. He does have really nice eurosteps and iso dribbles but still usually leads to layups or the free throw line.

The NBA shrunk down the number of voters this year it seems - there were 130 in 2015 and from places I read it was down to around 100 now because they took out the team sponsored media or it could be less so ESPN can have more of an impact.

From my count ESPN and Grantland (still ESPN back then) had 18 voters in 2015 - 5 of them had Harden over curry - but 2 of those 5 were Windhorst and Broussard both of whom have openly said they would be voting Westbrook.

Seems like ESPN released their voting results and the results and they had 27 votes - 4 went to Harden, 4 went to Kawhi and 1 to Curry so 18 of the 27 went to Westbrook. Yeah Westbrook is going to win this in a huge landslide.

Its unfortunate while Westbrook is a worthy candidate IMO for MVP this landslide vote really will dismiss how special the season Harden had.

 

I'm surprised it's as close as it is, actually. Given the media this season, was expecting a near-sweep.

 

You can't look only at a team's W/L record w/o it's star to determine the strength of the supporting cast. You have to factor in the caliber of opponent.

You can't win this argument.

 

I think it mattered, because Harden was leading the media MVP votes up until mid-season. I agree with most people here that crowning a player with 47 wins as the MVP sets a bad precedent, but Harden really seem to have dropped the ball in the last 10 games or so. And yes, recency bias is not fair, but that's just how human psychology works. There's a reason why every artistic work (movies, novels, music, etc.) has a structure of building towards the climax at the very end.