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#pounditThursday, March 28, 2024

Five likeliest NBA MVP candidates

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In the last eight years, the NBA has only had four different winners of the Most Valuable Player Award. LeBron James, Derrick Rose, Kevin Durant, and Stephen Curry. That’s it. That’s the list. To put that into perspective, we’ve gotten more Fast and the Furious films (five), Big K.R.I.T. mixtapes (ten), Modern Family seasons (seven), and Jeremy Lin hairstyles (too many to count) over that span than different NBA MVPs.

Now that two of those aforementioned names have joined forces on the Golden State Warriors in an attempt to monopolize the sport of basketball, another one has donated his body to Phil Jackson’s hyperbaric time chamber experiment in New York, and the last one has finally delivered on his ethereal promise to (and I quote) “win one for The Land,” will anything change in 2016-17?

Here’s a look at the five likeliest MVP candidates for the upcoming NBA season.

The New Power Couple: Stephen Curry/Kevin Durant, Golden State Warriors

The winners of the last three MVP Awards, Curry and Durant are now running mates in the Silicon Valley ready to unleash 11 barrels of hell on the rest of the league. But ironically, Most Valuable Player consideration is perhaps the only sector in which stockpiling that much talent can actually wind up being a negative. At its core, the NBA MVP Award is an honor that rewards team success and individual volume above most all else. Yay on one count, nay on the other for Stevin Currant.

This season’s Warriors will have a finite number of possessions to allocate amongst a number of moderate-to-high usage players. They already played at the second-highest pace in the league in 2015-16, averaging 101.7 possessions per 48 minutes. Replacing Harrison Barnes (who used 15.9 percent of his team’s possessions while on the floor last season) with Durant (30.5 percent by the same measure) will mean significantly less counting stats to go around for each individual player.

Having Durant as the one taking these wide-focused-open three-point attempts instead of Barnes will obviously do even greater wonders for Golden State’s efficiency and overall offensive potency:

But there will likely be a number of growing pains during the regular season, especially given head coach Steve Kerr’s desire to play Durant significant minutes at power forward and Durant’s own isolationist tendencies that often lead to him dribbling for eternities on end before pulling up for a jumper.

We already know the quintessence of Warriors Stephen Curry: the baby-faced killer who will rain basalt and obsidian from anywhere and everywhere on the court and is just as good at getting his teammates involved as well. But we have yet to even begin to discover that of Warriors Kevin Durant, and it will be on the Dubs to reconcile the two, perhaps to the benefit of their collective success but almost certainly to the detriment of the individual statistical glory needed to secure an MVP award.

The Jilted Ex-Lover: Russell Westbrook, Oklahoma City Thunder

Rule No. 1 of the National Basketball Association: don’t tick off The Brodie. And in leaving him for a new bae in The Bay, Kevin Durant most certainly ticked off The Brodie.

Here were Russell Westbrook’s per-36 averages in the 491 minutes he was on the floor without Durant last regular season: 30.4 points, 8.9 rebounds, 6.6 assists, 1.1 steals, and 1.1 blocks per game on 49/37/92 shooting splits. The numbers are even more staggering when you look at the numbers Westbrook posted in 2014-15 when Durant was still dealing with his Jones fracture. Durant missed the final 27 games of the regular season that year, and here’s what Westbrook put up in those contests: 31.1 ppg, 8.7 rpg, 9.9 apg, 2.0 spg, and 0.3 bpg, recording nine triple-doubles in the process. The shooting splits were noticeably worse (42/31/83), but that’s probably a better indication of what to expect from Russ in a full season of a Durantula-less existence given the inverse relationship between volume and efficiency. Either way, I’m fully expecting to see many more “me against the world”-type sequences like this from Westbrook:

This is a dude who attacks the rim with no regard for human, plant, aquatic, or extraterrestrial life, somebody who plays the game as if every defender placed in front of him is a personal affront. Westbrook knows how to channel his anger and chaotic energy into destruction on the hardwood better than just about anybody. And now that Westbrook has legitimate justification behind his anger? Best brace yourselves, because nuclear winter is coming.

And it’s not like Westbrook will never pass the rock again now that he no longer has to share it with KD. The 27-year-old has always been a much better distributor than he gets credit for, finishing second in assists per game and third in assist percentage amongst qualified players last season and always exhibiting a knack for nifty finds out of the pick-and-roll like so:

What’s working against Westbrook, however, is that the Thunder might not really be all that competitive next season. Other than the obvious drawbacks of losing a generationally-great scoring talent, the Serge Ibaka trade makes Oklahoma City worse in the short-term, as now they will be forced to throw new and untested faces into the fire pit right away. The Thunder will be relying heavily on Kyle Singler and Ersan Ilyasova for three-point shooting [shudders], the ‘Stache Brothers (Steven Adams and Enes Kanter) still have yet to prove that they can handle secondary offensive duties, and the loss of Dion Waiters’ instant offense will probably hurt more than you think. And history does not look too kindly on MVP candidates on bad teams, or at least on teams that aren’t amongst the NBA’s elite that year.

As such, Westbrook, who failed to lead OKC to the postseason in 2014-15 as “the guy,” probably isn’t in the perfect position to vie for MVP consideration. But it’s going to be damn fun watching him try.

The Elder Statesman: LeBron James, Cleveland Cavaliers

The King has proven time and time again that he doesn’t give two farts about the regular season. You can point to the two-week sabbatical he took at the start of 2015 or to the alarming number of midseason episodes where he just looks rather…uninterested.

Now, after delivering the City of Cleveland its first professional sports championship in over a golden jubilee, you would think that James would have even less reason to exert himself in the regular season come 2016-17. The logic goes that Akron’s Prodigal Son could use the 82-game grind to get Kyrie Irving and Kevin Love accustomed to larger responsibilities on the offensive end so as to take the weight off his own shoulders further down the road as he ages. And with James making it to six consecutive NBA Finals appearances and counting, it’s not like the battle in the East is all that fierce anyway.

But we have to remember: this is LeBron freaking James we’re talking about. Already the winner of four NBA MVP Awards, James recently came out and said that his new motivation is chasing “the ghost [who] played in Chicago.” For his part, Michael Jordan (in case you didn’t gather) took home MVP honors five times, twice after turning 33. You gotta think that matching Jordan’s MVP total is at least something that the 31-year-old James has in the back of his overactive mind.

Though we keep bracing ourselves for “LeDecline,” it just never seems to happen for Bron-Bron. He threw up a fairly effortless 25/7/7 in the 2015-16 regular season and still looked to be very much in peak “freight train” mode for virtually the entire year.

LBJ has a noted history of preserving his body for the postseason, particularly since he returned to Cleveland. But even operating at just 75 percent, James can still put together a stronger MVP case than almost anybody in the league. Don’t ever disrespect the throne.

Head to Page 2 to see the final MVP candidates.

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