NBA MVP Chase Standings Dec 7, 2024

Photo: Public Domain

The philosophy of the MVP Chase is that a league's MVP isn't some combination of great individual stats factored with team success, but that the MVP makes significant contributions to the greatest number of victories.

In basketball, the "value" of a player to a team's victory can be seen in measurables:

• Minutes Played (MP): this indicates how important a coach think the player is to secure the victory

• Plus-Minus (+/-): This indicates how effective the team plays when the player is on the court.  As there are only five players on the court, as opposed to nine or eleven on the field, +/- can suggest how valuable a player was by how efficient the team was while he was on the court.

In the NBA MVP Chase, I looked at players who were shown to be proficient offensively (a Player Efficiency Rating of 20 or more)  and counted the number of games in which:

• The team won

• The player had a +/- of 10 or more

• When the player had a +/- of less than 10, the sum of Minutes Played and +/- was forty or more (for example: 36 MP and a +/- of 6 is 42).

As of the games completed December 5, 2024, here are the Top Ten:

1. Jayson Tatum, Celtics

2. Evan Mobley, Cavaliers

3. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Thunder

4. Franz Wagner, Magic

5. Karl-Anthony Towns, Knicks

6. Jalen Williams, Thunder

7. Darius Garland, Cavaliers

8. Donovan Mitchell, Cavaliers

9. Jalen Brunson, Knicks

10. Jarrett Allen, Cavaliers

I'll mention that four Cavaliers are in the Top Ten, but only one in the Top Five, and the official NBA MVP ballot has only five slots.

Team or injury struggles have kept several traditional PER leaders off the list like Jokic, Giannis, Embiid, and Doncic. There is plenty of time for a couple of them to re-emerge. But as it is, Jayson Tatum has shown himself to be the guy who has the most good-to-great games in victories, and the MVP should have no other standard. 

James Leroy Wilson writes The MVP Chase (subscribe). Thank you for your subscriptions and support! You may contact James for writing, editing, research, and other work: jamesleroywilson-at-gmail.com.