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1. James Harden
2. LeBron James
3. Anthony Davis
4. Giannis Antetokounmpo
5. The box score from Phoenix-Dallas on Tuesday
(Just kidding -- Damian Lillard)
James and Harden are neck-and-neck in almost every metric. The Cavs have outscored opponents by six points per 100 possessions with LeBron on the floor since Cleveland upended its team at the trade deadline, reversing a weird early-season minitrend that had them playing at the same sad level regardless -- a trend unfit for the king.
LeBron since that deadline orgy has been the league's best player. It was enough to surpass Davis and Antetokounmpo. He is going to play all 82 games and lead the league in minutes for a defense-less traveling soap opera that would sink into the lottery if you replaced him with a league-average small forward. His clutch numbers are something out of "NBA Jam." Kevin Love, Cleveland's second-best player by a comically wide margin in the wake of the Kyrie Irving debacle, missed almost exactly the same number of games as Houston's second-best player, Chris Paul. And Paul is better than Love.
If given a choice between game-planning for Harden or James in a seven-game series, 30 out of 30 teams would pick Harden within five seconds of being posed the question.
But what happened before those two months, in Houston and Cleveland, matters at least as much as what came after. Harden and the Rockets played so well as to render their last 15 games of the regular season irrelevant.
Meanwhile, the Cavs collapsed amid infighting and embarrassingly listless play. LeBron in January could have galvanized his -- very much his -- dispirited team. Instead, he stewed in what almost amounted to a monthlong, on-court passive-aggressive rebellion.
We've seen Chill Mode LeBron. This was different. LeBron at times stood still instead of rotating on defense. He occasionally decided not to close out on shooters. During Cleveland's nadir, a couple of shooters caught the ball behind the arc, looked at LeBron as if expecting him to rush out, realized he had no plans to move, shrugged, and fired. Almost every other Cav played with the same sloth. It was, frankly, astonishing.
An MVP galvanizes. He lifts teams up and out of funks. LeBron didn't, or couldn't. There are people within the league who would use that midseason floundering to prop up LeBron's MVP case. They would frame it as part of some Machiavellian plot: LeBron realizing before his front office that Cleveland needed a shakeup, and scheming to make it happen in the only way he could, given his poisonous, reportedly nonverbal relationship with owner Dan Gilbert.
That is a bridge too far, even if the new Cavs are better than their broken, discarded predecessors.
Harden may not be a galvanizer, either. He let his relationship with Dwight Howard a couple of years ago disintegrate amid silence and unmade passes. He wilted facing elimination last season. That is part of the reason Houston added some fire in Paul. There will be a crisis moment in the playoffs when the Rockets need Harden to galvanize them.
But they haven't needed much of it in blitzing through this regular season, and that is the period voters consider. Houston has been the league's best team wire-to-wire, and Harden its best player. He just wrapped the greatest season of isolation basketball in league history, acting as battering ram in Houston's blunt force attack: pick-and-roll, switch, back it out, fatality.
Harden's step-back 3-pointer and shoulder-checking drives have long obscured his brilliance as a passer. Harden's style can bore, but there are few NBA moments more exciting than those eye-of-the-storm seconds in which Harden digests a switch and slides two steps back with a live dribble. His eyes dart side-to-side, the entire game in his hands.
If that defender on Eric Gordon so much as leans toward the paint in preemptive help, the ball is out of Harden's hands -- flying toward Gordon's fingertips while that poor defender tries too late to reverse his momentum. His pocket passes to Clint Capela, lobbed high over reaching arms or skipped low, like rocks on a pond, to skitter underneath them, are among the league's most gorgeous -- and earliest, tossed with pitch-perfect timing.
Harden is an offense unto himself. He is never going to be a plus defender. Even a disengaged LeBron, outside those outlier winter weeks of discontent, is a more impactful defender simply through the power of reputation and size. People fear the sudden appearance of dialed-in LeBron. They avoid him.
They will never avoid Harden. But Harden has cleaned up his defense. The comatose, meme-worthy blunders are largely gone. Houston has helped by surrounding him with plus defenders and giving him simple marching orders: switch everything.
Opponents have shot just 37.5 percent against Harden on post-ups, one of the league's stingiest marks, and he has poked away a ton of steals. He jostles for rebounds. When he snags them, he is lethal in flight against a defense discombobulated by Houston's switches.
Bottom line: This is Harden's year. Given equal statistical profiles, it is hard to reward an alpha player (LeBron) whose team -- the fourth seed entering Wednesday in the junior varsity conference -- is beset by constant, season-threatening melodrama.
Davis has been otherworldly carrying a preposterous two-way load for an injury-riddled team assembled by years of random, unconnected transactions. Antetokounmpo faded a hair down the stretch as the Bucks faded toward the bottom of the East. A lot of voters will leave him off the ballot as punishment.
I can't get there. I have long been open to a player on a 45-ish win team crashing the MVP conversation; the word "valuable" begs voters to consider team context that way, and last season's MVP, Russell Westbrook, came from a 47-win team. Michael Jordan spoiled us into thinking that a top-five player should win 55 games every season. It doesn't work that way. It's possible for the league's second- or third-best player -- and maybe its very best one -- to toil on a middling playoff team. The Cavs are a middling playoff team now, barely eking 50 wins, and LeBron will get a chunk of first-place votes.
The Bucks have been a trash fire all season whenever Antetokounmpo sits. He averaged 27 points, 10 rebounds, and 5 assists per game, while working as the league's best perimeter defender. He belongs.
The last spot came down to Lillard, Kevin Durant, Westbrook, LaMarcus Aldridge, the Toronto guards, and Nikola Jokic, keeping Denver alive to the last moment. (Kyrie Irving, Stephen Curry, Chris Paul and Jimmy Butler missed a few too many games.) I'd be fine with almost any of them. Durant is the best of those players, and was my initial choice -- a well-rounded superstar who will log almost 70 games for the championship co-favorite.
But Golden State is 7-10 in its past 17 games, lost without Curry, now behind Toronto in the overall standings. Portland is slumping too, but Lillard dragged them to a winner-take-all showdown with Utah on Wednesday for the No. 3 seed. Portland has been toast all season when Lillard sits. He is their lifeline, and he snags the last spot here. ___
it is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts. - sherlock holmes
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