Over at Sports Illustrated, Marty "Let the Motherfucker" Burns has his MVP contenders list out (note: I know he put this article out two weeks ago; I've been busy). He, as with the majority of the television analysts I've seen, lists Kobe as the front-runner. I can appreciate what he's done on the court, and how he's gone from horrible teammate to a not-bad teammate (which, when used as an absolute positive for his candidacy, is the greatest use of lowered expectations since...). But, Burns's thesis is, in a word, insane.
As a jump-off point, there are 5 legitimate, mainstream candidates for MVP: Kobe, Lebron, KG, Chris Paul, and maybe Dwight Howard (I do agree w/ Burns here). You theoretically could throw Manu in there too, on the theory that he's playing the best of anyone on the Spurs, who are still the mode pick to win the championship; but, no sixth-man is ever gonna win, so nevermind. KG, one of my favorite players of all time, has missed too many games and has seen his numbers drop too much to really have a shot at the award (although, clearly, he brings the leadership and team defense as well as anyone). Dwight Howard is dominant, but the Magic simply aren't anywhere near good enough considering the quality of his teammates.
So, we're looking at a three-man race. Leaving Paul aside, who's still mostly a wild card, there are the popular-wisdom two best players in the league: Kobe and LeBron. And really, this isn't even a debate. To the numbers: Kobe's going for 28.2-6.1-5.3, LeBron's getting 30.8-8.1-7.4. Better across the board (in fact, at least 2 better in each category). James also plays more minutes and shoots a better percentage, while turning it over slightly less. Further, statistician-extraordinaire John Hollinger has James leading the league in PER at 30.56, with Kobe coming in 7th at 24.84. James is more than 2 points better than the next best player (Paul), the biggest disparity between two consecutive spots anywhere on the list. The Roland Rating at 82games.com similarly has LeBron dominating the rest of the league. 82games also looks at stats in clutch-time: LeBron is leading Kobe in points, rebounds, assists, blocks, steals, and shooting percentage, while turning it over way less. LeBron also leads in clutch-time plus-minus per 48-minutes.
More importantly, though, there's this: I've heard it said that what's so beautiful about Kobe's season is that now that he's surrounded w/ good players, we're finally getting to see what he's capable of in his prime. But that's exactly the point. Kobe couldn't do this with a bad team (and, it's not like a team w/ Odom and Bynum, even w/out Gasol could ever be all that bad). With less-than-great teammates, he's just another great-numbers, bad-record guy. LeBron, with far worse teammates at almost every position, took his team to the NBA Finals. This year, with worse teammates at every single position (even going into the bench), still has his team 10 games over .500.
Put differently: If you traded Kobe for LeBron straight-up (and this hypothetical works since they both play pretty similar roles in their respective offenses), the Lakers would, at a minimum, not get any worse. The Kobe-led Cavs, however, would revert back to the Lakers of the last few years--that is, they would be another middle-of-the-pack team that would get murked in the first round. Sure, all this is hypothetical, but history and the numbers all back it up.
As for Paul, well, 21.3-4-11 is nice, as are the steals and shooting percentage, but they're still don't match the across-the-board dominance of the King (Paul also comes up short in every statistical algorithm mentioned above). And while NOLA's 42-20 is also nice, his teammates are still far superior to LeBron's at all positions.
Witness.
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