Why Isn’t Jayson Tatum Getting More MVP Buzz?

"Best Player on the Best Team" sounds like a nice MVP formula. Why isn't it working?

Jayson Tatum has been the Celtics’ best player this season. (Credit: Sarah Stier/Getty Images)

After the recorded conversation of our podcast ended,

Tom Haberstroh

and I were idly chatting about the MVP race — we both think OKC’s Shai Gilgeous-Alexander should win, though I am still not sure he will win — and we started wondering why Boston’s Jayson Tatum wasn’t any higher than he is in the MVP odds despite leading the team with the league’s best record:¹

After adjusting FanDuel’s MVP odds for the juice, Tatum has less than a 1% implied chance of winning the award. That feels strange for the best player on the NBA’s best team — and, coincidentally, Yahoo Sports' Ben Rohrbach raised a similar version of the same question Tom and I were pondering in their newsletter Wednesday:

Whatever happened to the "best player on the best team" argument for MVP? … Tatum can do anything and everything on the court. He is an elite scorer, creator, defender and rebounder from every level, from every position. No one else at the top can make that claim.

"Best player on the best team" does seem like a winning combo for the MVP. But I wanted to check how often that was actually true over the years. Let’s start by looking at the history for players who led the team with the top record in Wins Above Replacement (WAR) since the ABA merger:

Just over half of the time (53%), or 25 times in 47 chances, the MVP winner was also the leading WAR-getter on the team with the best record. That’s not a bad track record! The top team’s WAR leader also finished Top-3 in voting 66% of the time — though they also finished outside the Top 5 in 32% of our sample’s seasons, including outside the Top 10 17% of the time. (In a shade under 13% of seasons, the best WAR player on the best team failed to even register a vote.)

Of course, we can’t necessarily expect previous MVP voters to have measured “best player” status according to a statistic that wouldn’t exist for years (or even decades) into the future. So what if we looked at a simpler determinant for whom the best player was on the best team? Here’s the same chart as above, but looking at the points-per-game leader (with a minimum of 58 games played per 82 team contests)² on each team with the league’s best record since the merger:

Perhaps surprisingly, the leading scorer on the team with the best record also won MVP 25 times in 47 seasons (53%). Top scorers were very slightly more successful at earning Top 3 rankings (68%) and they were less likely to be locked out of the voting entirely (9%), but there wasn’t a tremendous difference in MVP support overall depending on whether we measure “best player” status by simple PPG or more advanced metrics.

What does this mean for Tatum? Certainly, a 53% historical MVP win rate — and an average MVP finish of 4.4 for best players on best teams³ — would seem to suggest he deserves better than to be buried behind leading players on teams with far worse records.

But as Tom pointed out to me, Tatum’s campaign doesn’t have as much narrative power as you might expect from his “best player on the best team" status. He was also the best player on a Celtics team that finished with the second-best record last season, and that landed him a distant fourth in the MVP voting. The dominant storyline of this year’s Celtics is how the offseason additions of Kristaps Porziņģis and Jrue Holiday — as well as the ongoing emergence of Derrick White — came together to create a juggernaut of an ensemble cast. It’s tough to stand out as MVP within that narrative, even if you are still the top player in the bunch.

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Filed under: NBA

1. Odds in this story are as of Wednesday morning, Feb. 14.

2. In honor of Bill Walton winning MVP with 58 games played in 1977-78.

3. Combining the distributions for both of the ways we looked at it.