NBA MVP race looks to be wide open in reshuffled league hierarchy

With more NBA teams believing they have a title shot than there have been in some time, the reshuffled NBA scene also leaves a wide-open race for MVP.

As the dust settled on an offseason that could be dramatically undersold as … eventful, the NBA season is set to tip off in less than a month, with opening night festivities set for Oct. 22.

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The Toronto Raptors are the defending champions, but are expected to take a tumble down the standings after the free-agent defections of Kawhi Leonard and Danny Green. Similarly, the Golden State Warriors — now without Kevin Durant and set to play without Klay Thompson until the All-Star break at the earliest — are no longer viewed as the dominant force out West.

Instead, there are a bushel basket full of teams that enter the 2019-20 season with title aspirations and with that comes just as many players who could finish out the campaign holding the coveted NBA Most Valuable Player award.

The MVP award has a complicated history, one that splits into two distinct periods. From the time it was first handed out after the 1955-56 season through the 1979-80 season, the voting was conducted among the players.

It wasn’t until 1980-81 that the media became the arbiters of value and the history of the media vote is … sort of all over the place.

The recent trend, however, has been that the MVP comes from the team that finishes the season with the NBA’s best record. That formula has held true in four of the last five seasons, with the lone exception coming when Russell Westbrook matched Oscar Robertson‘s triple-double season averages for the Oklahoma City Thunder in 2016-17.

But there are other issues at play, some more recent than others. NBA MVP voters, much like college football poll voters, have a tendency to defend their hill for a lot longer than logic might otherwise dictate.

Last year’s winner, Giannis Antetokounmpo, put up tremendous numbers while leading the Milwaukee Bucks to an NBA-best 16-win improvement to leap from the middle of the pack to the best record in the league.

Meanwhile, 2017-18 NBA MVP James Harden of the Houston Rockets has spent considerable time this offseason telling anyone that will listen that he was denied a second straight MVP award because the voters latched onto the narrative of the Greek Freak and didn’t let go.

For the record, I think the right guy won, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t also some truth to Harden’s argument that voters twisted themselves into pretzels in an effort to somehow invalidate the historic scoring binge The Beard put on over the second half or so of last season.

Despite what social media might try to teach us, complex issues very seldom break down into an either/or choice. Instead, it’s those pesky varying shades of gray, an area in which one can believe that Antetokounmpo should have won and yet also believe there was a presence of an anti-Harden bias.

MVP voters in the NBA have shown themselves over the years to be a somewhat fickle lot, as well, as evidenced by Shaquille O’Neal‘s one MVP award despite a period of roughly a decade where he was the most unstoppable inside force in the game.

After four MVP trophies in a five-season span from 2008-13, voters seem similarly to have moved away from LeBron James, perhaps in a subconscious effort to spare themselves the likely backlash if The King were to match Michael Jordan‘s total of five MVP honors.

Some things to bear in mind when considering MVP candidates:

• They will come from a playoff team. The last MVP winner from a non-playoff team was Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, selected by the players after his first season with the Los Angeles Lakers in 1975-76.
• They will come from a team with a winning record. Abdul-Jabbar in 1975-76 and the first winner, Bob Pettit of the St. Louis Hawks in 1955-56, are the only MVPs to come from teams that finished below .500.
• They will be younger than 30. The last player named MVP in his age-30 season or later was Steve Nash of the Phoenix Suns, who was in his age-31 season when he won the second of his back-to-back MVP awards in 2005-06.
• They will score at last 20 points per game. Nash is also the last MVP to win scoring less than that in the season in which they won, averaging 18.8 points per game in 2005-06.
• They will miss no more than 10 games. The last MVP who played in fewer than 72 games over a full season (excepting the lockout season of 2011-12) was Allen Iverson of the Philadelphia 76ers in 2000-01, when he sat out 11 times. Moreover, he is the only player voted MVP by the media to have done so (Bill Walton of the Portland Trail Blazers won with just 58 games in 1977-78 when the players were still voting and is the only other MVP to miss more than 10 games.)
• They will be in their third season or later. Wilt Chamberlain in 1959-60 and Wes Unseld in 1968-69 are the only rookies ever named MVP, but the only second-year players to win were Bill Russell of the Boston Celtics in 1957-58 and Abdul-Jabbar with the Bucks in 1970-71.

Despite all of that, some of the candidates named here may not check all of those boxes. This is going to be a different sort of season than we’ve seen in awhile, one in which there could be a jumble of teams fighting for home-court seeding in the first round. We’re closer to parity than we’ve been in decades and that can throw some of the formulas out the window.

And with that, here are the top 10 candidates for NBA MVP in 2019-20.