With the NBA regular season coming to a close today, sev
eral players are vying for the league’s most prestigious honor: the Most Valuable Player award. Likely to receive votes this year are: New Orleans Pelicans power forward Anthony Davis, Cleveland Cavaliers forward Lebron James, Oklahoma City Thunder point guard Russell Westbroo k, Houston Rockets shooting guard James Harden and Golden State Warriors point guard Stephen Curry.
I’ll begin with the New Orleans Pelicans’s Anthony Davis. The 22-year-old forward, in his third year, has already ascended into the NBA’s elite and has shown remarkable improvements in his short career. Davis has put together the most well-rounded season of any of the candidates, scoring 24.3 points per game, 10.2 rebounds and a league-leading 2.9 blocks a game. Davis also added 2.2 assists and 1.5 steals per game, and shot 53 percent from the field. The Pelicans are currently 44-37 and fighting for the 8th seed in the Western Conference, which puts him at a huge disadvantage for the award.
Lebron James is averaging 25 points, 7.4 assists, 6 rebounds
and 1.7 steals per game on 48 percent shooting, but, since this is actually slightly below James’ career averages, no matter how
outstanding it still is, he doesn’t stand a good chance to win. James also missed about two weeks of the season, which hurts his case also.
That brings me to who the three players most likely to be put to a vote: Westbrook, Harden and Curry.
Most NBA fans have seen Westbrook’s incredible play s
ince teammate Kevin Durant went out with a season-ending injury. Westbrook has tried to carry the team by himself and has notched 11 triple-doubles, eight more than any other player in the league, and is narrowly leading James Harden as the top scorer in the NBA with 28 points per game. He also has 8.6 assists per game, good for fourth in the league, the second most steals per game in the NBA with 2 and adds 7.3
rebounds per game which is an outstanding amount for a poi
nt guard. With that also comes a league-leading 4.4 turnovers per game and poor shooting percentages of 42 percent from the field and 29 percent from beyond the arc. In addition, his scoring outbursts haven’t always translated into wins for his team, who are still fighting for the last Western Conference playoff spot.
In my mind, James Harden comes in second in the MVP race. Harden has scored excellently and carried his team for much of the season while superstar center and team mate Dwight Howard battled injuries. Harden has scored 27.5 points per game, dished out 6.9 assists, 5.6 rebounds and has 1.9 steals per game on the defensive side of the ball, where he has improved a lot this season.Despite this improvement, the Rockets were still better on defense with him on the bench, and his lack of a big two-way impact hurts his MVP chances in my mind. He shot a solid 44 percent from the field and 37 percent from three, but those percentages pale in comparison to Curry’s.
Curry has been the most important player on the league’s
best regular season team, the Golden State Warriors, who went 66-15 overall this season. Curry scored the sixth most points and had the sixth most assists in the league with 23.9 and 7.7 respectively. Curry has also had the fourth most steals per game with 2, along with 4.3 rebounds per game. What really puts him over the top is his shooting percentages; Curry shot almost 49 percent from the field and was able to shoot as well as Harden’s 44 percent field goal percentage from behind the three-point line. In fact, Curry broke his own record for most three-pointers made in a season with 284. Curry was able to perform at a high rate in every aspect of the game while shooting with unheard-of efficiency and leading his team to the best record in the NBA.
For these reasons, Stephen Curry deserves to be the 2015 NBA MVP.
