BPM's Predictive Qualities, Validity of Measured Impact, Voter Trends, and What That Means for the 2022 MVP Race.

Oringinally posted here.

With the season coming to a close and there being a lot of chatter about how this is the closest MVP race in recent times and considering how significant and commonly used these catch-all/all-in-one statistics have become in the overall NBA discourse, I wanted to do a medium-dive on how well they've been able to assess the greatness of a season and accordingly predict who will/should win the MVP.

In doing so we can try to figure out if these are valid tools to use when comparing players to each other, if they are able to accurately assess a player's impact on the court, and if they line up with the eye test/known truths (Jrue Holiday is a great defender, Kevin McHale was a great scorer) regarding player's abilities and performances. Or at least provide a small data point in figuring that out in the long run in an attempt to end the fruitless war between the "analytics guy" and "that boy nice" watchers, math dorks vs. hoopers, and who I really am vs. who I wish I was.

Before I go any further there may be someone out there reading that asking, "What is a catch-all statistic and is this just some stupid thing that only those people who watch box scores and not games care about?"

First of all I resent the remark if you were thinking it, I have you know I was the starting point guard for my division 1Z team in high school and also watch lots of games.

Secondly and to answer the question, catch-alls or all-in-one statistics are a numerical result of a formula that intakes any number of different data sets and compiles them into a singular number that expresses how good or bad a player has been.

A different way of putting that doesn't sound so belabored and like I was looking up from my TI-83 as I said it, is it's kind of like you are trying to rate what the best ice cream flavor is based on a ranking system of taste, texture, temperature, adaptability, and stand-alone deliciousness, and then finding a way to take all those things into consideration in a way that lets you spit out one singular number as it's rank or rating. First you have to figure out how to define each one of those five things, then you have to figure out how important each is, then you figure out how to combine the results into a single rating.

It's basically just, "let's look at everything a player does, find a way to judge how important each thing is on the court depending on their position/circumstance/etc., and give that a single number."

Also, strawberry.

There are a number of different versions of these catch-all statistics that take in different types of data, even when they take in the same datasets they may value them differently, but they all have the same goal of gauging a player's impact on the game. For this write-up I'll be primarily highlighting BPM (box score plus/minus) as it's the one that goes back the furthest due to it using only widely available box score data. It'll give us the biggest data set to mess with.

Before we look at some BPM data, lemme hit you with just a few quick notes about BPM if you don't feel like reading the breakdown of it. Otherwise I'm kind of just throwing out a number at you and telling you the higher the number the better the player and nothing else about how or why or what. If you really care about understanding it, or need further convincing of it's validity/methodology, then for sure read the detailed breakdown of how it works.

• BPM is a single number that's comprised of your OBPM (offense) and DBPM (defense) added together for a total net number. The higher the better.
• A -2.0 or below are most end-of-bench players. Think Kent Bazemore or Ziaire Williams.
• A -2.0 BPM is a bench player. Think Coby White or Isaac Okoro.
• A 0.0 BPM is a decent starter or 6th man. Think Tim Hardaway Jr or Monte Morris.
• A 2.0 is a good starter. Think Mike Conley or Domantas Sabonis.
• A 4.0 is an all-star caliber season. Think Bam Adebayo or FVV.
• A 6.0 is an All-NBA season. Think Ja Morant or Jimmy Butler.
• An 8.0+ is an MVP caliber season think Luka Doncic or KD.
• A 10.0+ season is a historically great all-time season.
• It is great for assessing offense, but struggles with defense. That's something you will find with damn near everything trying to assign a number to defensive ability. It's just too hard to do reliably because a lot of what makes a great defender like screen navigation, passing lane denial, a small's ability to front a big, boxing out on defensive rebounds, isn't gonna show up on a printout. So take the defensive assessment (DBPM) with a Kawhi-sized handful of salt. It may happen to be accurate for one player (Matisse Thybulle's excellent DBPM of 3.5), while being entirely inaccurate for another (Jason Tatum's pedestrian 0.5 compared to Luka Doncic's superior 1.8).
• BPM is a rate stat used to "estimate the player’s contribution in points above league average per 100 possessions played." This allows BPM to account for the huge change in pace across league history/differences in minutes played and adjust accordingly, that way a cross-era comparison can be better standardized and hopefully more accurate.
• BPM only uses stats that are widely available. That means no play-by-play data so things like deflections, passes, assists via screen are not included. No second spectrum data or anything you have to pay to access. Just the base level stuff that has been tracked since 1974.
• BPM weighs stats differently depending on position. For example, since rebounds are expected and easier to come by from centers, it is more notable if a guard rebounds at a high rate. 10 rebounds from a 6ft guard are not assessed the same value as 10 rebounds from a 7ft center. Similarly, since assists are expected from a point guard their BPM is not as heavily effected by a high assist total as opposed to another position. The opposite of that would be that a point guard will be docked more if they're not generating assists at all. For scoring, if a player is a low volume scorer they are docked much more heavily if they are inefficient since they are often only shooting open looks that are generated for them. Conversely if a player is a high volume scorer they are given more of a bonus if they retain efficiency, as the defense on them is more keyed in, they are generating their own offense more, taking more difficult shots, etc. There is a breakdown of the specific weights and how they are favored in the link which I'll attach one more time, yadda yadda, you get it.

• There is an adjustment based on the player's team so it is not just a singular vacuum sealed number. It matters who your teammates are and BPM attempts to account for that.

So with all that out of the way let's look back at previous winners of the MVP and their associated BPMs. I'm also going to include RAPTOR and LEBRON which are two other catch-all stats, but they only go back a little way comparatively. You can click on those for links to their respective breakdowns, as RAPTOR and LEBRON are a bit more complicated and are taking in a lot more data than BPM is. Way too much for me to go through here and I won't really be referencing them.

Anyway here's our MVP/BPM table to look at:

Some pretty interesting results here. Is it what you expected? What jumps out? Does Shaq's beef with Nash now need to escalate? ...Moses?

What first jumped out to me is that recently BPM has been pretty spot on as far as being an MVP predictor. It has come to the same conclusion for who had the best season/who should be the MVP as voters did in 10 of the last 12 seasons. The two years where it differed from who the voters chose were 2018-19, where Giannis won the MVP and Harden was #1 in BPM (+11.00) and Giannis was #2 (+10.4), and 2010-11 where D. Rose was the MVP and LeBron was #1 in BPM (+8.1) while Rose was #3 (+6.8).

In that 2018-19 season where Harden lead in BPM he was the leader in RAPTOR while Giannis was a distant 8th. However Giannis was the leader via LEBRON that year. What does that mean? Is Harden bailing from the Sixers and heading to Toronto next year? Is Giannis losing his hair? Maybe both. Maybe neither! I suppose it could signify a higher reliance on whatever defensive metrics they're pulling over at BBall Index, or a lower reliance on scoring/creation, but I'm unsure where that weighting lands. Interesting nonetheless and one of the more compelling seasons to get in a twitter fight about.

In the 2010-11 season Rose's Bulls were the #1 seed thanks to Thibs playing them like it was the playoffs every night of the regular season resulting in the league's best defense. Some say you can still hear the echo of "ICE!" if you put your ear up to Benny the Bull's horn. Rose was the scoring battery for that team, similarly to how Booker is for the Suns this year, but also took on the main facilitating duties as well. Albeit a pretty slow and structured offense. LeBron that year, despite leading in BPM, was maligned by media and fans alike for having gone to Miami. On top of that they didn't end up getting the #1 seed in the East either after the "5..6..7..." stuff. Nobody was really looking to give him any love. I think that year is a good example of voters heavily leaning on seeding and allowing outside narrative or voter fatigue to shape their vote. Rose did have an All-NBA type of year either way. I don't want to take that away from him, but it's wild that Rose got 113 1st place votes out of a possible 121, Dwight got 4, LeBron got 3, and Kobe had 1.

That table made me want to pop another table out there to look at the expected MVPs (those who lead the league in BPM) of these players compared to how many they actually won. Just to get a little tally and clearer picture of what we're working with there in terms of successfully predicted MVPs, or the correlation between "best season" and MVP vs. actually awarded MVPs.

Quick note in regards to the 'or' part of the below table: If a player was within 1 BPM of the BPM leader, whether that was who won the MVP or who "should have" won, I will give that situation the benefit of the doubt and let it be a toss up where both players were deserving enough of the award.

So what are some interesting things we can take from this?

• From 1974 to 2021, there were 26 years (55%) where the MVP winner lined up with the BPM leader.
• 32 of those years (68%) the MVP winner and BPM leader were 1 BPM or less apart and therefore an accurate result by my arbitrary cutoff and reasoning. See: or/wash. Wash. Or. Oar. Wash away... Sea. Wash the deck? Sea oar? Sea org! Maybe Scientology owns the NBA! Maybe Tony Brothers is an asset used to launder tithes via sports gambling! I'll come back to this later in another article, "Refs And The Spread: How My Bagel Ended Up With Nothing On It".
• Again, since 2009 there has only been one result (Rose) where the BPM leader did not also win MVP and/or was within the wash cutoff.
• The 5 largest robberies or disparities in MVP history via BPM in order of most egregious are Kobe in 08 (-5.1), Nash in 06 (-5.1), Hakeem in 94 (-5.1), Nash in 05 (-4.8), and Moses in 94 (-4.8).
• Nash's 5.0 BPM in 05 was good for 11th in the league, almost 5 points behind KG's leading 9.5. 06 he was good for 15th in the league and a full 4.1 points lower than #1 LeBron's 9.1.
• Moses was 19th(!!!) in the league via BPM when he won in 79, almost 5 points behind league leader KAJ's 7.6. When Moses Malone won in 82 he was 7th in the league at 4.5 which was still 3 points away from Dr. J's leading 7.7. Malone repeats as MVP in 83 and falls even further away from leading Larry Bird (7.5) and finished 12th in BPM at 3.7.

What does this mean for this season?

Well the most telling part of this would be bullet #2 there. BPM has accurately picked the MVP leader every year (again, wash zone for the Giannis/Harden MVP) since 2009, the one exception being the D. Rose MVP. That could indicate that, potentially, that voters are being less swayed by team record and general narrative/"feeling" about players that doesn't align with trackable on-court production than they used to be or it could mean that there haven't been as compelling of narratives.

One line of thinking is that it could help Jokic's case for MVP, as he has assured he will end the season as the leader in BPM even while the Nuggets currently sit at the 5th seed in the West. A wrinkle in that is that it has been very rare that the leader in BPM is not also on a 1st-3rd seeded team in their conference. That creates a debate voters will have to have regarding "individual success" vs. "team success", though Giannis, Embiid, and Jokic don't actually sit very far apart in the actual wins and losses columns.

For the truly lazy or checked out voter (or fan), the Nuggets being the 5 seed could be a real pipe in the spokes for their thought process. That certainly exists in the MVP ethos right now whether that's a talking point to continue to generate TV content and social media engagement or not. Either way an MVP (or BPM leader) as the 5th seed has been so infrequent that assuming the Nuggets do not go anywhere major in the seeding and get into the 3rd or 4th slot, it would mean Jokic would be one of 4 players in our 1974-2022 timeframe to win MVP without homecourt in round 1. Westbrook was the 6 seed in 2017, Moses was the 6 seed in 1982, and Kareem finished 40-42 and out of the playoffs in 1976. That's right, we have had an MVP who missed the playoffs! Is that good for KAJ's legacy because he was that dominant, like Jerry West winning the Finals MVP despite being on the losing team, or bad? I dunno!

While winning and MVP on the 5th seed is exceptionally rare, there have been MVPs on 2 and 3 seeds who ended up with about as many games won as the Nuggets, or Bucks, or Sixers will. As of writing this the Nuggets are only 1 game back of both of those teams in wins and it would be silly to dock any one of these guys, who should be locked into being the 3 finalists, for whatever their seeding ends up as. The seeding is ultimately pretty arbitrary and artificial compared to just looking at the wins and losses.

Additionally, if voters are looking to factor wins/record into the equation instead of seeding, which may we all hope they do, then it can be pointed out that the Nuggets are 45-27 with Jokic this year, the Bucks are 42-22 when Giannis plays, and the Sixers are 43-22 with Embiid playing. All within the same realm of each other no matter which way you look at it, which should therefore cut out any sort of generic seeding or wins weight being put on the MVP this season. The exception being the choice to go the other way with that and make cases for how impressive it was to get a roster to whatever win total it ends up being at, and if it is more or less impressive than the other candidates.

In that line of thinking and since BPM is an attempt to show a player's impact on the court in terms of point differential, we could go a step further and take a look at another stat to help confirm BPM's assessment: efficiency differential/expected wins.

Per Cleaning The Glass, the efficiency differential is how many points a team scores per 100 possessions (the same rate adjustment BPM is doing) minus the team points allowed per 100 possessions. Essentially just an extra step to, "hey this is how much more x team scores than their opponent when y player is playing, compared to how their team performs when they aren't."

For instance this year when LeBron James was on the court, LA was outscored by their opponent by 2.2 points per 100 possessions. That's not good. When he went to the bench though it got even worse and the No Time Lakers were outscored by their opponent at a rate of 5.7 points per 100 poss. That would give the Lakers with LeBron on the court an expected win total of 36, and with him off the court a total of 27, resulting in a +9 on the season for LeBron. A good thing while being a bad thing.

Compare that to last year where the Lakers were a 64 win team when LeBron was on the court and outscored opponents by 9.9 pp100 (I can't keep typing the whole thing out and I like how pp100 sounds), and were outscored by 2.9 pp100 when he was off the court for a 33 win pace. That resulted in a +12.8 differential between LeBron on vs. off, and a +31 expected wins from him when he played. Really, really good number.

But back to our King Ghidorah of MVPs this year.

The Bucks are playing at a 59 win pace when Giannis is on the floor and outscoring opponents by 7.9 pp100. When he is not on the floor they are outscored by 4.1 points which is a 33 win pace, for a +26 expected wins. The same number he had in his 19-20 MVP campaign, though that team played like a 73 win team with Giannis on and a respectable 47 win team with him off.

Oddly enough the number is exactly the same for Embiid: +26. When the Sixers play with Embiid they are outscoring other teams by 7.5 pp100 and are on a 59 win pace. When he leaves the floor they are outscored by 3.3 pp100 and play like a 33 win team.

You may be wondering, how are they both a +26 if Giannis's team scores more when he's on the floor and scores less when he's off the floor than Embiid's. Well, mainly defense. But you can look into the specifics of that if you wish.

Now on to Jokic, our BPM leader and theoretical MVP favorite. With Jokic on the floor the Nuggets have played like a 61 win team. They are outscoring opponents by 8.6 pp100 which is just slightly ahead of the other two guys here. The difference is when you look at how the Nuggets are performing with Jokic off the court. Without him, the Nuggets are getting outscored by an even 10 pp100. That is 99th percentile "Jesus Christ make it stop". This results in a staggering +43 expected wins for Jokic, tied for the highest mark of all time (only tracked back to the 03-04 season) with Steph Curry's unanimous MVP 2015-16 season.

A 61 win pace is a remarkable measure considering that the Nuggets have been missing their 2nd and 3rd best/highest paid players for the entire year, resulting in a starting lineup of Monte Morris, Will Barton, Aaron Gordon, Jeff Green, and Nikola Jokic.

Jump stopping back into BPM, when we look at these three teams rosters it really starts to highlight what each player has been working with all season.

The Nuggets have played two players with a positive BPM this year, the first of course being Nikola Jokic and the second being Monte Morris who has a BPM of +0.1. Something to keep in mind that I mentioned earlier is that a +0.0 is a decent starter is solid 6th man according to BPM. For players who have over 500 minutes played on the season the next highest player is Davon Reed at a flat +0.0, after that are Will Barton and Aaron Gordon at a -0.5 and -0.6 respectively. That's essentially saying that the Nuggets are a team of 6th man types/low end starters and deep bench players, as high minute reserves such as Forbes, Rivers, and Cousins are past a -3.0, and even starting forward Jeff Green is a -2.5 on the season. Ultimately I think this model might slightly underrate Aaron Gordon, who defense included has been the Nuggets 2nd best player this year.

Switching to Philly, they look to be noticeably better as a team. Outside of Embiid, in 674 minutes since rolling his way over to Philly, Harden has been a +5.4 via BPM which is solidly in between an All-Star and All-NBA level of production. Matisse Thybulle rests at a +1.3 this season, which is entirely thanks to his defense as he's a -2.2 via OBPM. Drummond a +1.2 (✌️), Maxey a +0.3, Harris a +0.2 (or in other terms a bargain at $13,000,000 per +0.1 BPM), and then a steep decline after that.

The Bucks are somewhat similar to the Sixers but do not have that rock solid All-Star caliber production this year from a second player, though to be clear we can't understate that Embiid did not have that for most of the year either. I will say that Jrue (+3.2) and Khris (+1.5) are rock solid and Jrue is having a better season than BPM suggests he is. I think he is one of the three best perimeter defenders in the league, has been having a great offensive season, and a lot of the Bucks struggles on defense have been due to Brook Lopez being out all year and having to play with Giannis and Portis as their only two centers. That hurts everyone. After those two are Allen is a +0.3, the aforementioned Krazee-Eyez Killa a +0.2, and then a steep drop off after that.

Both the Sixers and Bucks have fielded significantly more talented teams than the Nuggets, so says BPM, but less than a team like the Suns for example, who sports a fully BPM-positive line-up of their starters and over 500 minute rotational players with exception of Elfrid Payton (-2.9) and Landry Shamet (-0.9). Torrey Craig barely misses the cut-off here and is also negative, but I assume that's because he plays half his minutes directly after being hit in the face.

Stepping away from teams as a whole and back to individuals, here are some other MVP "candidates" this season as well:

The three biggest takeaways here for me are that Jason Tatum has had a way bigger impact on the Celtics than people realize, Devin Booker has had way less of an impact on the Suns/the Suns are just a really excellent team who easily can plug holes when they appear, and that I have no idea what to say about the Mavs being better with Luka off the floor and that makes me very suspicious with no other data to pull from.

That made me want to check out Dallas really quick, so I'll put on my cowboy boots and take off my N95 mask.

A brief glance it looks like the few minutes Doncic is off the floor the Mavs turn into an absolute juggernaut on defense. That stands up to what I've seen this year overall as I think Maxi Kleber and Dorian Finney-Smith are two of the league's most underappreciate or under the radar defenders. Bullock is rock solid as well. But I don't know a whole lot about how Sterling Brown, Frankie Smokes, or Bertans have performed on that end since coming to 'the other D'. I'm also not sure how well that defense would stand up to a greater sample size, or what happens when teams play their starters more, but that would help explain how the Mavs with no All-Star caliber players outside of Luka are on the verge of taking the 3 seed in the West.

They are running the slowest pace in the league, have the 7th best Def Rtg as a team, and are holding opponents to the 2nd lowest PTS/G in the league. So that's all checking out and also explaining how Doncic's DBPM is a lot higher than you would think it is watching him play. Either way I'm gonna say the Mavs are not actually better without Luka playing, but come playoff time in those non-Luka minutes their ability to constrict other teams like your pet python you sleep with every night and are worried why it's stopped eating the past month, could be extremely valuable.

Let's get out of Texas and head back to the league's decade long hot streak of concurrent BPM/MVP. Interestingly enough this parallels my own 10-year hot streak of throwing up when I drink a double-shot of Bailey's, an old family tradition for whoever ended up with worst March Madness bracket. May my continued mediocrity inspire me to one day be as accurate as that Octopus who picks the World Cup games.

Speaking of things with tentacle-like appendages Jokic has the highest BPM of all time, and RAPTOR, and most other all-in-one metrics. Giannis? Well he's having the 14th best season of all time via BPM, and Embiid is having a top 40 season himself. All clear-cut MVP caliber players.

That's kinda nuts so why not take a look at how these incredible seasons stack up to some of the other historically monstrous individual BPM seasons of all time, if for no other reason than to place them in context of the greatness we've seen through the years. This will also be per 100 possessions as to not mess with the MPG discrepancies and difference in pace between eras.

Looking at these lines it does feel like BPM accurately captures exceptional seasons. At least offensively. BPM is indicating that there is a clear outlier of the 3 finalists this year, and looking at it through the BPM-lens it is surprise that the stat is rating Jokic's season as the best ever. He has more rebounds than Kareem ever pulled down, as many points as Kobe ever scored outside of 06, and as many assists as Gary Peyton ever dished. That last part is crucial because BPM is giving a lot of weight to Jokic's one-of-a-kind playmaking from the center position.

Because we have never seen someone do what Jokic is doing at the position (sorry Arvydas and Walton), there may exist an argument against him in the future along the lines of, "Well BPM just didn't know how to handle assessing offenses run through the center. It overvalued assists generated by an unexpected position and spat out an outlier number."

For that argument to hold water two things will have to be the case.

One, is that you have to believe that Jokic's facilitating and control of the offense is not as valuable, impactful, or direct compared to someone like CP3, Stockton, Magic, etc. Those giant BPM seasons from Magic were built off of giant assist numbers, extremely efficient scoring, and also positionally elite rebounding. The same with CP3 but with the addition of elite box score defense. In my opinion Jokic is having an equal effect on his teams offenses as those two had, and his offensive impact as the de facto point guard is no less than theirs. The big spike in BPM he's getting from averaging that many assists as a center in his case feels individually fair, as it's also unable to consider how many assists he is creating as a screener, or that he is leading the league in passes, or the truly unique problems having a point-center creates for other teams as well. Ultimately he's domething traditionally only point guards (or point-forward LeBron) have done. All in all having his offensive impact as a facilitator be truly in line with those two feels correct.

Where I would differ with an assessment like that for an high-assisting center is if the BPM model suggested a Magic/Jokic-level offensive creation impact in the case of someone like Wilt in the 67-68 season where he lead the league in assists. Without even getting into the rate/pace adjustment for a guy playing 47 minutes a night on a 124 pace Philly Squad (top of the league in pace this year is Houston's 100.6 for comparison), Wilt was not creating offense for his teammates in the same way Magic, or Jokic, or a point guard traditionally would. There is a big difference between a hand-off assist, and an assist which is leading a player to an open bucket that he would not have had otherwise. A preemptive passer compared to a reactive passer. BPM doesn't account for that and so it is just good fortune for the model's accuracy that Jokic is indeed that kind of proactive/preemptive passer as opposed to a reactive or stationary pylon type.

The other thing that would have to happen is that we will have to see a lot more Jokic-type guys enter the league as time goes on. BPM would go through an adjustment at that point where they would have to normalize how much weight they are putting on point-center types of guys if we are one day flooded with them, in the same way BPM had to be reworked after Westbrook's MVP season.

Ultimately this gigantic +13.68 BPM does match up with the eye test regarding Jokic. Giannis and Embiid too for that matter. As it did with watching peak Jordan and LeBron. Now the question does eventually have to be asked, does this mean this is the greatest season of all time? Is Jokic this season better than any regular season version of Michael Jordan or LeBron James?

I do think that there is an argument for this Jokic season being the greatest offensive season from a player ever. Especially when considering the team around Jokic and their performance when he's on the court. As we saw, the scoring is all-time level, the efficiency is essentially unheard of outside of Steph Curry's except Jokic is doing it on mostly 2-pointers, the rebounding is up there with the greatest seasons of all time, but to accept the entirety of that +13.68 we inevitably run into the fact that Jokic's DBPM is a league leading +4.5.

Is Jokic the best defensive player in the league? No. He isn't. While he is a much better defender than most people realize, even better than people who give him credit for being above-average, he is not having the 5th greatest defensive season of all time. What I will say, however, is that the Nuggets defense is tailor-made to Jokic's skillset. This isn't going to become a breakdown of the Nuggets defensive scheme, that's not why we are here, but the giant DBPM is a result of Jokic's ability to be elite on defense inside of that scheme at the certain things asked of him, his 93rd percentile rebounding, and 97th percentile foul avoidance, and other stats point to this.

An equal or perhaps greater reason for how that DBPM ended up so high is how bad the Nuggets defense is when he leaves. For example, when Jokic is on the court the opponents will make only 15 FTs per 100 possessions. That's that 97th percentile foul avoidance, which I guess is an odd plus for his general lack of high-contact/above the cylinder rim protection and risk avoidance on defense. However when Jokic leaves the court the Denver Nuggets take out the NBA 2k disc and pop in Dynasty Warriors, as they allow over 25 FT makes per 100 possessions which is dead last in the league.

Ultimately for Jokic's case, even if you were to take away the entire DBPM portion of that +13.68 from him, his OBPM alone would put him only .3 behind Embiid's total BPM, leaving him with the 48th best season of all time via BPM and well above BPM's "MVP season threshold". That is significant considering how well BPM assesses offensive impact. This would also vault Giannis into a comfortable lead for MVP facorite.

It also can't go without saying that we all know that Giannis and Embiid are better defenders than Jokic in a vacuum. While Embiid's DBPM of 2.1 is probably a fair assessment this year, given that he has had a pretty major regression in defense overall due to spending such a huge part of the season carrying a massive offensive load, we know that he can turn it on and be an all-time elite rim protector and paint defender when it's called for.

Giannis has also been placed in an odd situation this year, given that he has had to spend so much of his time playing a more reserved or traditional defensive role as a big because of the lack of Lopez; Giannis is the best help defender in the league and shines the brightest when he is able to be a free safety, so as great as Giannis has been on defense this year (3.5 DBPM, for whatever it's actually worth), we know that he too can be even better.

DBPM does a decent job of rating the best defenders of all time, and I don't think there's anyone on there that is particularly undeserving of being up there, but it does serve to point out that sometimes these catch-all stats are highlighting how much better a player is than his teammates as much or more than how good this player is themselves. Though that is a much harder question to answer, as circumstance and situation are wholly inseparable from a player's impact on the court. At the end of the day BPM is not tracking what a player's potential ability is and that could be a good thing and/or a bad thing depending how you look at it.

Anyway, say Jokic doesn't win this year. The streak is broken. Maybe good news for my bracket and stomach next year, maybe bad news for the validity of BPM as a model. Maybe neither and people just say the voters are stupid and I'll try to sync my thunderous heaving to One Shining Moment for the 11th year in a row. It wouldn't be unprecedented for the BPM leader to be past 2nd place BPM by 2> to lose the MVP. We've seen a good chunk of MVP winners be pretty far away from the BPM leader, whether that's from voter fatigue, or they sunk their teeth into a narrative, or heavily valued a team's win total and directly correlated the best player on that team to it.

There will almost certainly be 1st place votes cast for Booker this year under the assumption that his impact and responsibility for the Suns 62-66 wins is equal to Embiid's impact on the Sixer's 48-52. They would be wrong to think that of course, and there is a whole host of different arguments you could make to suggest he isn't even the most impactful or important player on his team, but it will happen nonetheless.

If Booker were to win, or if Tatum, or Embiid, it would end up being be the second top-10 season via BPM to not win MVP, the first being David Robinson's +11.87 93-94 season. It would be the first time since Rose that we would have the BPM leader not be the MVP. It would also mean that the single greatest season in NBA history, according to BPM at least, would not have been worthy of the MVP. That is pretty significant regardless of how you feel about the totality of BPM's validity.

On the flipside if Jokic does in fact win the MVP, that means Giannis will join the aforementioned Admiral and Michael Jordan (2x) as the only players to not win the MVP while having a +11.0 or greater season via BPM, and Embiid will join a small group of guys who have lost the MVP while having a BPM of over +9.0.

Either way we are going to end up with a worthy winner and two unfortunate losers, not to mention Luka who is sporting a +8.2 BPM, over the "MVP-season" threshold.

I'm not sure what more to look into here but if there's a specific BPM/catch-all related thing regarding this season or historically you want me to look up or comment on, feel free to leave it below and I'll do my best.