Welcome to Stats and Predictions, a series of articles where we are going to predict (with the support of numbers and statistics) these last months of basketball, the most beautiful part of the year for fans. Let’s start today and let’s ask the numbers for help to understand who will win in the race for the Most Valuable Player, in the NBA.
Currently there are 3 left in the race and they are, at least according to the bookmakers, in this order: Jokic 1.50, Embiid 3.00 and Antetokounmpo 7.00. Popular opinion tends towards the Cameroonian, the Serbian is in fact in a ranking position with which only Westbrook managed to win the MVP in 2017 and the Greek has accustomed us to this level of play having already won the prize twice. In short, this is the year of Joel Embiid.
HOW CAN NUMBERS HELP US?
More than a decade has passed since D’Rose’s MVP in 2011 and in recent years statistics have assumed an increasingly fundamental role in the voting criteria for the MVP. In the Excel sheet you see below I took into consideration all the most important advanced statistics, the games played and the team record (giving a different specific weight to each of these) and a unique formula came out.
I obviously verified this formula, trying it with the data of all the vintages from 2012 to 2021 and each time the first on the list actually corresponded with the MVP, even in the year where Curry was not first for PER or in the year where Westbrook was playing for those Thunder sixth in the west. If you are familiar with Excel and you want to have fun, I leave you the formula (where D7 is the box with the 71 games played by Jokic, to guide you):
= ((F7 * 3) + (E7 * 50) + (D7 / 5) -100) + (G7 * 30) + (H7 * 50) + (I7 + J7) / 2) / 9) * ((E7 * 10 + F7) / 100)) * 2.7
Therefore, taking as valid what the table tells us, Jokic will actually be the MVP of the season (remember quoted 1.50 by the bookmakers) closely followed by Giannis, while surprisingly Embiid seems almost not to be part of the discussion. Doncic and Tatum got fired up too late and Booker just doesn’t have that statistical impact one would expect from a league MVP.
So my prediction is Nikola Jokic MVP [1.50]but this was just the appetizer: the NBA, Euroleague and Serie A playoffs are about to begin and, although the so-called “mvp conversation” is always exciting, now we get to the heart of the season and statistical analyzes and predictions await us more and more interesting.
See you next time, loads like never before for this post-season.
