who is mvp 2014-15

chris paul deserves to be on this list, because it's those 6 guys then there's an enormous drop off

curry = harden >> lebron = davis = paul >> westbrook

westbrook has put up some insane numbers but his usage is so high to the point where it's a bit ridiculous. his true shooting is like league average or below

yeah i had paul on there for a second but just couldn't see him actually winning the third, whereas the top four i think could all legit take it

winning the *thing*

russ just got his 10th triple double of the year btw

I'm contrarily

1. Steph
2. Bron
3. Brow
4. Harden
5. Westbrook

Curry is the best player and the MVP

1. Harden
2. Curry
3. LeBron
4. Westbrook
5. Davis

1. curry
2. harden
3. bron
4. brow
5. cp3

I guess you can slot juiceman in cp3's slot interchangeably

1. Davis
2. Harden
3. Curry

kevin k otm in this thread but i think curry is a few steps ahead of harden in the race

i would vote curry, but harden's main asset in this race is his minutes load compared to curry. though curry shouldn't be penalized for missing like 25% of 4th quarters because his team is so good

curry is better than harden [/homer] but harden is more "valuable" in that the rockets would be much worse w/out him than the w's w/o curry, imo.

but i want russ to win, why because he is just so awesome, even though he obviously does belong in 5th place here according to actual MVP "metrics"

curry is better than harden but harden is more "valuable" in that the rockets would be much worse w/out him than the w's w/o curry, imo.

this is m/l my reasoning for putting harden at the one slot

but i want russ to win, why because he is just so awesome, even though he obviously does belong in 5th place here according to actual MVP "metrics"

― brimstead, Wednesday, April 1, 2015 11:37 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

russ belongs in an ornage julius why because hes the juiceman

maybe the nba can invent a juiceman award... but they don't have to give it out every season, only if a true intense juiceman is out there who warrants it

curry is better than harden [/homer] but harden is more "valuable" in that the rockets would be much worse w/out him than the w's w/o curry, imo.

― brimstead, Thursday, April 2, 2015 12:37 AM (21 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

literally anyone who gets into semantics with the word "valuable" shd be banned from ilh no offense, also clay shd be banned for leaving cp3 off this list

MODS PLZ DELETE THIS POLL

I'm sorry that I ruined ilh plz delete my account

plz delete this poll and put cp3 on it and leave the following worthless chuckers who dont play D off thx

James Harden, Rockets
LeBron James, Cavaliers
Russell Westbrook, Thunder

who is mvp 2014-15 part 2 now w/ chris paul

the real mvp poll ILH MVP 2015

Feel like it's between curry and harden despite what wbrook is doing. lebro waited too long to get going and the league is bored w him now. Brow has missed too many games too and no one talks about him anymore cos they probs just think he's gonna win like 7 in a row starting next year. Cp def should be in the convo but curry vined him twice this year so he's disqualified.

Aka kev otm

Currys been smoking hot since the asb too. But yeah he doesn't play many 4th qs.

curry is better than harden but harden is more "valuable" in that the rockets would be much worse w/out him than the w's w/o curry, imo.

this is m/l my reasoning for putting harden at the one slot

― Clay, Thursday, April 2, 2015 12:41 AM (7 hours ago

i think lagoon is overselling the case a little bit (basketball isn't baseball, which is essentially a 1-on-1 simulation run 600 times -- one player can affect his team's fortunes to a significant degree), but anytime you get into valuable talk you get into dicey territory. like it's definitely possible that by taking harden off the rockets his team is in much worse shape than if steph got taken off the warriors, but it's not really fair to penalize steph for the rest of his team being really good

Brow has missed too many games

― #wegonnabechampionship (Spottie), Thursday, April 2, 2015 2:18 AM (7 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

has played exactly the same # of games as westbrook

why hasnt this thread been deleted yet

westbrook has missed too many games too

1. curry
2. beard
3. cp3
4. bron
5. brow
6. juiceman

sometimes i wonder how playing in the western conference might affect lebron's stature/legacy

I honestly think about that pretty often, it will def be something that's talked about re: the scope of lebron's career after he's retired, that he spent his entire career dominating a weak conference

it helps his legacy to be a Z-time champion

prob wouldve had a couple fewer finals appearances but for most of his career the imbalance wasnt nearly as strong as it is rn

like for this season for my hypothetical MVP vote i just couldn't countenance giving him a vote over curry/harden/paul, players leading their teams to equal or better records who play in a conference that is 10x tougher

stats vs west conf actually lil better than vs east

http://www.basketball-reference.com/players/j/jamesle01/splits/

teams still play over a third of their games against the other conference u guys know

stats vs west conf actually lil better than vs east

http://www.basketball-reference.com/players/j/jamesle01/splits/

― A True White Kid that can Jump (Granny Dainger), Thursday, April 2, 2015 2:10 PM (1 minute ago)

yeah and the cavs have dominated the west in the 2nd half iirc but the other games matter too

bron doesnt deserve the mvp because he a. stopped playing defense b. is not as good at offense as he once was

teams still play over a third of their games against the other conference u guys know

― lag∞n, Thursday, April 2, 2015 2:11 PM (3 minutes ago)

playing 1/3 vs 2/3 against a much tougher conference is a huge difference, tho as mentioned bron has played well against the west

part of this is about this year's MVP vote but part is about legacy/titles. i mean bron obviously knows as well as anyone playing in the east has helped him

cavs 18-12 vs the west

playing 1/3 vs 2/3 against a much tougher conference is a huge difference, tho as mentioned bron has played well against the west

― k3vin k., Thursday, April 2, 2015 2:17 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah i suspect as far as an individuals stats its prob not that big of a difference

i mean much what is much

the five teams who have given up the most points this year are all in the west

the east is soooooo bad

the five teams who have given up the most points this year are all in the west

― lag∞n, Thursday, April 2, 2015 2:25 PM (7 minutes ago)

wow advanced stat

context kevin, context

only 4 of the bottom 13 teams in point differential are in the west

and only 4 of the top 13 are in the east

the west is better obvs, but thats not what were talking about, were talking about the mvp award, in which case points allowed per game is prob the more relevant stat in this garbage process, ie bron wld have no problem putting up big numbers in the west

yeah except no one cares about points per game anymore

thats weird because theres a high coloration between the options in this poll and the nba scoring leaders

http://i.imgur.com/R4i6dbU.png

well yes the best players tend to score the most

hmmm

anyway i'd like to see a stat like PER adjusted for league quality, WAR in baseball does this. RPM does this in a sense too i guess

that chart proves chris paul isn't the best player, good point

the one chart that explains why a player whos actually good at every facet of the game is being ignored in favor of a bunch of one dimensional chuckers

Players who have enough offensive talent that their teams use them as the first option tend to rise to the top of the list of scoring leaders, but mvps tend to be at least above average defensive players, too. Harden was in the same category as melo in mvp conversations until he tightened up his defense this year. He still won't win it.

Where things get sticky is players like AD, who is great at both ends but gets penalized for his team's poor W-L record.

xp boogie, brow, bron and steph are one dimensional chuckers????

(yes, bron isn't phenomenal defensively but one dimensional seems like a stretch)

i notably am not asking said flabbergasted question re: juiceman and harden

bron has picked it up defensively since his trip to biogenesis

Harden was in the same category as melo in mvp conversations until he tightened up his defense this year.

― Giant Purple Wakerobin (Aimless), Thursday, April 2, 2015 4:11 PM (20 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post

hes tightened up his D in the sense of mostly no longer stands perfectly still as if under a witches curse not in the doesnt still get constantly get beat on backdoor cuts sense

steph is gonna win obvs if anyone was wondering

xp boogie, brow, bron and steph are one dimensional chuckers????

― pimento is a cheese, some call it the caviar of the south (slothroprhymes), Thursday, April 2, 2015 4:12 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

well obvs not brow

i mean if u want my thoughts on the matter u cn just visit the one true mvp poll ILH MVP 2015

steph is gonna win obvs if anyone was wondering

― lag∞n, Thursday, April 2, 2015 4:14 PM (4 minutes ago)

yeah i don't think it'll be close

I don't agree any of those guys are the mvp of the ilh board they barely even post

i mean if u want my thoughts on the matter u cn just visit the one true mvp poll ILH MVP 2015

― lag∞n, Thursday, April 2, 2015 4:18 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i voted in both to hedge my political bets, like just in case you have a falling out and decide to run against clay rather than with him

yeah i don't think it'll be close

― k3vin k., Thursday, April 2, 2015 4:19 PM (2 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i wld perfect to see someone who is dominant on both sides of the ball but i wont be mad at steph cause hes doing things no one ever has before, truly becoming a transcendent offensive player, tho i hope he continues to refine his game on that end cause while hes brilliant hes still maybe a lil uneven, if harden or russ won i wld be mad tho

Curry has a higher DRPM than Chris Paul

i do not acknowledge that stat

imo the sportvu stuff cld be pretty revelatory re quantifying D http://grantland.com/features/department-of-defense

i like RPM because i think it's the perfect method, statistically, for determining who the best players are. obv in practice it has its flaws but it's a good starting point. i would bet that the difference between curry and paul on the defensive end has as much to do with their difference in height and the quality of their teammates as it does their actual defensive value

i can understand why ppl like the concept of RPM but its results are just so screwy and inconstant from year to year that i cant take it seriously

sportVU stuff is cool to see who is good at what specific random stuff. in epidemiology we call these soft outcomes, things that are cool and seem important and related somehow but don't tell you what you really want to know. in basketball you want to know what dudes make their teams score more points than the other teams

like hey cody zeller is the 23rd best player in the nba this year!

last year he was 294th why is no one talking about this!

like it seeks to decontextualize players from their teams but pretty obviously fails miserably at the task

it's obv imperfect but it's the best we have and imo a good starting point. like i said you can assign rough ratings to players and then from there take things on a case by case basis using the eye test or knowledge of how the stats are made to say this dude is too high or too low

its the best we have from the pov of what wld be the god stat its not the best we have as far as being actually good or useful

if youre gonna apply yr eye test and adjust then info like the sportsvu stuff is actually much more useful cause it can call into question the assumptions underlying yr eye test

what if sportsVU says Chris Paul sucks

not possible

like the eye test made up of things like "kawhi is the best at double teaming the post then effectively closing out on three point shooters" you can actually to some extent examine if that is true

tho clearly even then its strongly influenced by his team

xxxp idk it's hard to argue with most of the top doors

xxp i think it's easier/better to get the overall number then use the little stats to make sense of it rather than start with the pieces and try putting them together in own own arbitrary and possibly biased ways

i agree conceptually im just not sure basketball is actually amiable to that approach, which is what imo makes it so interesting, like the cold precise ways baseball can be broken down is so boring and tedious to me

Curry was a good defender last year that people grudgingly admitted was mediocre, and now he's a great defender that people grudgingly admit is good

if he was a great defender kinda doubt GS wld go to all the trouble of having klay guard opposing point guards so much

^^^

i think steph is the best player in the league this year

steph still looks like a bad pick and roll defender to me but maybe the stats don't back that up

if he was a great defender kinda doubt GS wld go to all the trouble of having klay guard opposing point guards so much

― lag∞n, Thursday, April 2, 2015 2:00 PM (19 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this doesnt happen as much any more. you guys watch his D on CP this week?

curry 3rd in steals fwiw

oh wait he's first actually

Of course monte ellis is 2nd so that stat is worthless lol

Please don't engage me, I'm just being a boob

Uhhhh... the Cavs are +20 wins and the Heat are -20 wins from last year, and people are saying LeBron is NOT the MVP?

i think him having missed that stretch of games due to injury/needing to rest knocked him out of the conversation, whether that's fair or not is a worthwhile question but I think betting against steph is a fool's errand at this point

taking the first half of the season off altogether hurt his chances imo

buuuuuuurnnnnnnn

i wasn't gonna be that harsh but yea he was lackluster by his standards until he took a break and looked hurt, as ppl said a zillion times on here and elsewhere

fuck the grizzlies but ugh fuck this stupid season

rong thread

if he was a great defender kinda doubt GS wld go to all the trouble of having klay guard opposing point guards so much

― lag∞n, Thursday, April 2, 2015 9:00 PM (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

they stopped doing that this year so you're running out of asterisks

also there are very good reasons for them to do that even if he is a great defender, chiefly that he has a gigantic offensive workload

I am genuinely curious who is going to end up third in the official tally. I assume lebron?

well actually 3 is almost certainly born, I guess it's 4 where it gets wonky and you're in sportswriter world. Probably Russ and cp3 at 5.

brow at 5

well i'm more talking about how the voters end up falling than where i think dudes belong. sportswriters will probably punish brow for lack of experience imo.

they stopped doing that this year so you're running out of asterisks

― Matt Armstrong, Saturday, April 11, 2015 5:34 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

they still do this a lot ive seen it

i think kawhi has leapfrogged westbrook on my pretend MVP ballot

OKC's medical staff ran out of juice

Xp if kawahi had been healthy all season u might be talking contender for defensive player of the yr

I think he's a lock for it regardless - who's his competition? realistically I mean. doc rivers' deandre campaign notwithstanding.

i think draymond's getting dpoy

draymond's name has been thrown around quite a bit yeah, and bogut. anthony davis?

its kawhi tho

def

oh kawhi should win, just narrative seems to have been leaning in draymond's direction

forgot draymondo, and yea he's played the whole season & is a great defender but...it's kawhi

kawhi played pretty bad or not at all for most of the year hes not getting any awards

lagoon i swear to god if you call kawhi overrated

we must remember that every award vote is in some ways a hot take

goon say cp3 should win every award we all know you want to

kawhi is overrated... on ilh

im deducting 25% from every spurs players rating until i see them maintain their performance on another team

yellocarded

lol

ha

i mean tim duncan is the second oldest player in the whole gdamn league its high time we came to grips with the fact that none of this makes any sense

sometimes i think of the spurs as some kind of cult and tim duncan is their tom cruise

something like that

i mean there has to be an explanation

he's been making $10m/year for years how is that possible

tony parker is Operating Cowboy IV

kawhi might be 4th on my MVP ballot rn *shrugs*

mvp is about the whole year thought not most of march and april

ya srsly cmon

i mean russ averaged a trip dub for a month just give it to him

well i said might. russ/bron/davis have missed a lot of time too

i mean tim duncan is the second oldest player in the whole gdamn league its high time we came to grips with the fact that none of this makes any sense
--lag∞n

lol are you bout ta propose some truther theories

i wonder if crawford is gonna with sixth man for the third or fifth time or whatever, he probably is

*win, jesus am i high in this thread

injured too long - it will be lou will or 🙏🙏isaiah🙏🙏

lol are you bout ta propose some truther theories

― slothroprhymes, Sunday, April 12, 2015 12:13 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ya idk pop is some sort of actual wizard?

http://blog.mysanantonio.com/spursnation/files/2014/05/spurs-game-of-thrones.jpg

well yea of course, tim is also a once in a lifetime player more so than any spurs star even the admiral, but the "system" critique can prob be employed about many others (which is not to say that it should)

just tried to construct a spurs lineup where kawhi guards steph and maybe u cld do it but prob not with parker playing

cause who amongst us wld not love to see that match up

kawhi will definitely see some time on steph if/when they meet in the offs

not the whole game but stretches

wld like to see like the solid last ten mins of a close game

i mean what if steph gets the mvp then kawhi owns the hell out of him, awkward

haralabob getting mad @ steph "elite defender" hype rn on twtr

strauss is a pretty blatant homer. curry is obviously a legendary offensive player and an average defender, nothing wrong with that

its not just strauss

calling steph an 'elite defender' is hyped-up nonsense, but he's not a matador defender or anything that bad. and he is this season's mvp. if steph doesn't have it locked down by now the mvp voters have shit for brains.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

it's not really fair but now that the rockets aren't going to have home court in the first round i think harden has zero chance

results are right and just imo, some brow presence would be great but his snub is a sad yet foregone conclusion in the IRL voting so I'm assuming we went in with the same thinking here

Westbrook voters out yourselves

I voted for harden two weeks ago but would shift that over to Steph today, I have been justly convinced

i don't think brow in any way shape or form deserves the MVP

BROW GOAT

grantland's hot takes on eoy awards
http://grantland.com/the-triangle/nba-awards-ballot-part-1-in-praise-of-the-individual/

most of the picks are pretty reasonable imo altho i disagree re: 6 man because #homer

grantland obv cribbed their mvp ballot from my list upthread

low's top 5 is my exact top 5