RebKell's Junkie Boards

[justintyme]

[justintyme]

[pilight]

[Randy]

This one has gotten ugly. MVP is just a matter of opinion. And opinions are like a-holes - everybody's got one.

[Aladyyn]

[justintyme]

[pilight]

Fowles and Charles don't play the same position. Fowles is a center, Charles has played PF all season for the Liberty. Vaughn and Stokes are the centers for NY, with a dash of Zahui B.

eFG% and TS% are important, but they're hardly determinative for MVP. If they were, Fowles would have three already. Fowles can afford to pass up bad shots because she has teammates who can score consistently. Charles doesn't have that option because she doesn't have Maya Moore and Seimone Augustus as teammates. She has Epiphanny Prince and Shavonte Zellous. Fowles's efficiency is a function of her role and her teammates. Charles has a different role and vastly inferior teammates. You can't compare the two with just stats.

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[justintyme]

The difference between the 4 and the 5 when it comes to PER is negligible. The problem is comparing front court versus back court. Fowles and Charles are solidly PER comparable. The striking difference between the two's numbers pretty much sums up the entire story.

And I agree the efficiency numbers do not tell the whole story. But when they are taken in combination with the rest of the numbers Fowles has put up, they put her so far ahead of the rest of the pack that it isn't even funny. Not to mention these efficiency numbers are 4th best of all time, and only Nneka (last year's rightful MVP) has had better efficiency while being top 3 in points scored.

There is a reason Fowles got 13 of the 14 AP votes (note that it was Parker who got the lone outlier, not Charles).

Yes, Fowles has better teammates. Perhaps they helped her have a better season than Charles' teammates did for her (but note that the lack of any other real option also helped her lead the league in scoring as a volume shooter). I mean, no player can do it themselves. Most of the time when someone wins MVP they credit their teammates for making it possible. Ultimately though, for whatever reason, Fowles did have a demonstrably better season than Charles. The numbers back it up, the results back it up, and the simple eye test backs it up. One has to fight to make a case for Charles, while Fowles' season jumps off the page.

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[pilight]

Parker as MVP is ridiculous, IMO. Charles is defensible, even if she's not my pick.

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[Luuuc]

[GlennMacGrady]

There has to be some theory or practical methodology for the selection a "most valuable" player. I don't see how that theory or methodology can be other than subjective, even if it wholly or partially relies on objective statistics.

I think it's mildly instructive to consider a semantic analysis of what the term "most valuable" can mean.

First, I assume that the "most valuable" player in the league is not a synonym for "the best" player in the league, because those two phrases use different words.

Next, it is obvious that the word "valuable" must have an object. That is, to whom or to what is the player valuable? There are only two logical candidates for the valuing entity: the league or the player's team. It makes no sense to me to ask what player is most "valuable" to the league as a whole. That sounds like it could be the player who stars in the most popular WNBA TV commercial, who is most attention-getting on WNBA billboards, or who attracts the most fans to an opponent's arena.

Hence, the "value" of the player, semantically, must be measured at the team level. The first inquiry is: What player is "most valuable" to each team? There can be many ways to answer that question. Several involve statistics such as scoring, rebounding, EffPG, PER, or plus/minus. However, the "value" of each of these statistics as the proper MVP metric is almost entirely subjective -- some people value one statistic highly or the most; others don't.

Another way to measure value, perforce subjectively, is to ask which of each team's players would be chosen for the Klingon Death Match. That's been discussed and weaknesses have been pointed out.

A reasonable way to measure value, which again will be subjective, is to use a subtraction approach, as several posters here have suggested. That is, we ask which player, if subtracted from each team, would have resulted in the most damage to her team's record so far this season. That's the team's "most valuable" player, and that can be done for each of the 12 teams.

The second inquiry under the subtraction methodology is: Which team would have fared the worst if its MVP had not been on the team? That may be a difficult question to answer. Different people would probably have different answers. They all will be partially subjective, even if based on some subjectively preferred objective statistic.

It's not clear to me that Sylvia Fowles is the "most valuable to her team" player in the WNBA under this semantic analysis and using the subtractive methodology. As suggested by others, I think it would be reasonable to conclude that Skylar Diggins or Tina Charles, or maybe Jonquel Jones, has been more valuable to her team's record performance this season than Sylvia Fowles.

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[SpaceJunkie]