LeBron James Has Best Case for MVP
April 11, 2008
With the season winding down — and with the Knicks making a mess of their lottery chances — let's look at another situation going awry: the Most Valuable Player debate. In my mind, the MVP debate is only close because people are confused as to what "most valuable player" really means.
Some folks seem to believe that the award should go to a perennially great player who has never won the award before (such as Kobe Bryant). Others seem to believe that it should go to a future Hall of Famer most closely associated with the best turnaround from losing to winning in league history (such as Kevin Garnett). And a rapidly growing multitude believes that it should go to a player most responsible for taking a team from the doldrums to the elite (such as Chris Paul).
Bryant, Garnett, and Paul all have interesting Most Valuable Player award candidacies. But none of them can match the performance of LeBron James. James is scoring, assisting, and rebounding at tremendous rates. His overall production is far superior to any of the other players in the conversation.
James hasn't had any games to rival the 48-point performance he dropped on Detroit in Game 5 of last year's NBA Eastern Conference Finals, a game in which he scored 29 of his team's last 30 points (I would say his 50 against the Knicks at the Garden comes close, but consider the opposition.) But the King James version of basketball this season has been frighteningly good, if not incredible. He is averaging 30.2 points, 7.9 rebounds, and 7.3 assists per game, while shooting 48.2% (that's 3% higher than the league average). Or put another way, James has scored or assisted in 42.7% of the 7,559 points that his Cavaliers have scored this season. In addition, he has just shy of one-sixth of the Cavs' 3,468 rebounds. And did I mention that he missed six games with a hand injury?
LeBron may be putting up numbers comparable to the great early seasons of Oscar Robertson, who averaged a triple-double in 1961–62, and nearly did so in the seasons that preceded and followed that one. While James's 7.3 assists and 8.2 boards per game are remarkable figures, they don't seem to compare to Robertson until you consider a key extenuating factor: pace. Robertson's Cincinnati Royals played a much faster tempo than today's game. So, games had many more possessions per contest and higher scores — opportunities to bolster offensive statistics.
