What dictates an the Most Valuable Player is something we debate annually in nearly every professional sport. Things like Best Player On Best Team, Most Impact and the Take Him Away And How Much Worse Would The Team Be test all factor in. What is often comes down to is striking a balance, finding a player with all-league stats on a championship contender.
Personally, I like to look out the player’s overall impact on their team. Luckily, NumberFire.com has created a stat, nERD, that measures NBA players’ overall impact. I’ll let them explain.
"For those of you unfamiliar with nERD, it’s a player ranking that measures the total contribution of a player throughout the course of a season, based on their efficiency. The league average is 0. Comparable to win shares, this ranking gives an estimate of how many games above or below .500 a league-average team would win with that player as one of their starters."
So, based on nERD, this is who ranks as the top-5 early MVP favorites.
1. Anthony Davis, New Orleans Pelicans
2. Stephen Curry, Golden State Warriors
3. Chris Bosh, Miami Heat
4. Kyle Lowry, Toronto Raptors
5. James Harden, Houston Rockets
This is what NumberFire.com had to say about Bosh:
"Yes, the real Chris Bosh is back. Without Mr. James around, Bosh has put the Heat on his back and morphed back into the NBA superstar we all saw in Toronto. In fact, he finds himself at number five in our player rankings with a nERD of 17.4 while LeBron is on the outside looking in (-0.7). I never thought I’d say that, but Bosh has been the best player on his team by far.Even with Dwyane Wade looking his younger self, Bosh has more than tripled Wade’s nERD rating (5.7) over the first two weeks. It’s really clear that Bosh has made the Heat his team. Bosh has accounted for 30.7% of his team’s total nERD of 56.6 while leading Miami to a record of 5-2. Now with the opportunity to put up big numbers night in and night out, I expect to be mentioning Bosh a lot for weeks to come."
Take a look at the top five. No LeBron James and Bosh is the top Eastern Conference player. The Heat, with Bosh and Wade (whose nERD rating is better than that of LeBron) are definitely contenders in the East if these performances hold up. And I expect they will. How much do voters take a stat like this into account? Not much, probably, but the stat seems to reflect individual aspects that are taken into account by the voters. If that makes sense.
The coolest part about this? It totally backs up what me and David Ramil were talking about on Monday’s podcast. Check it out here!
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