Which Golden State Warriors Player Has Strongest Award Case?
With the amount of individual excellence sprinkled throughout the Golden State Warriors’ roster, one could make a legitimate case for any number of these players taking home a piece of hardware at season’s end.
Stephen Curry is a legitimate MVP candidate, racking up gaudy stat lines on a game-to-game basis while most importantly steering his team to victory more often than not.
Klay Thompson, who earned his first All-Star selection this year, is in the hunt for the NBA’s Most Improved Player award, while Draymond Green doubles as both an MIP and Defensive Player of the Year contender—a title Andrew Bogut is in the running for as well.
And despite seeing a significant dip in his numbers between this year and last due to a change in his role, Andre Iguodala could be among the handful of players around the league that receives votes for Sixth Man of the Year.
At this point, instead of wondering “if” one of the aforementioned Warriors wins the award he is currently associated with, it seems more appropriate to ponder which one of them has the best chances of actually winning.
That distinction goes to Curry and his case for league MVP.
With just a handful of games left on the docket for all 30 teams around the league, the race for the 2014-15 Most Valuable Player award has boiled down to just three players: Curry, James Harden and Russell Westbrook. But when factoring in team success, which is absolutely a factor in determining who claims the Maurice Podoloff Trophy as his own, it proves Westbrook to be inferior to both Curry and Harden.
Don’t get me wrong, Westbrook has been otherworldly for the majority of this season, becoming the first player since Michael Jordan to string together four straight triple-doubles in a single season. The UCLA product has 10 trip-dubs in total this year and they haven’t been of the minimal variety (31.6 points, 12.1 rebounds, 12.6 assists average line).
The knock on Westbrook, though, is his sky-high usage percentage. Westbrook uses 38.3 percent of the Oklahoma City Thunder’s possessions, a number that leads the league by four percentage points and places him above Curry and Harden by about nine and seven percentage points, respectively. That fact alone leads one to wonder what both Curry and Harden could do if they had the ball in their hands that often on a nightly basis.
That leaves us to decide between Curry and Harden. Each has guided his team to the top of the brutal Western Conference and is virtually irreplaceable.
With Dwight Howard out for a large chunk of the regular season, Harden has been the driving force that has kept the Houston Rockets running. The Rockets are 14.2 points per 100 possessions better offensively with him on the floor compared to when he sits on the bench. They do sacrifice 3.1 points/100 on the defensive end with him active, though, which is something that can’t be said about Curry.
Golden State outscores its opponents by 13.1 points/100 with Curry on the court and is actually 3.2 points/100 worse defensively with him on the pine. That speaks volumes to the improvement Curry has made on that end of the floor this season. Granted, he still isn’t by any means a perfect defender and the Warriors often have to hide him on some of the opposition’s weaker offensive players.
In addition to his impressive on/off splits, Curry is the only player in the league who ranks in the top 10 in five major statistical categories: points (23.8, third), assists (7.8, sixth), steals (2.1, third), free-throw percentage (91.8, first) and three-point field goal percentage (43.4, tied-fifth). This is not to mention his third-place ranking in Player Efficiency Rating (27.8), eleventh-ranked offensive rating (121.5) and top-20 ranking in defensive rating (101.0). And of all these categories, Harden only places above Curry in points per game (27.5).
With that in mind it’s important to remember that Harden plays nearly six more minutes per game than Curry does and has fewer offensive weapons with whom to share the scoring load.
In Golden State, Curry has the option to defer to teammates like Thompson, Green, Iguodala, Harrison Barnes and so many more. Harden, on the other hand, really only has Trevor Ariza, Josh Smith and, to some level, Dwight Howard.
Were the two to switch roles it would be safe to assume that Curry would average closer to 30 points per game with the Rockets.
One could also argue that Curry deserves the MVP because he is the best player on the league’s best team—a notion that this scribe doesn’t wholeheartedly believe in. To completely ignore that as a legitimate factor would be naïve.
Some may argue that Curry isn’t the hands-down MVP of the NBA this year while others have no doubt in their minds that he is.
Tim Kawakami of the Mercury News is one of those people:
"In fact, I think Curry will be named MVP in a few weeks -- the tide is turning his way, and the full breadth of his and the Warriors' season-long accomplishments is becoming impossible to ignore.
Curry is joined by a tremendous cast of supporting players, of course; no player wins 60 out of 73 games by himself.
But the Warriors are now clearly, clearly the best team in the league, and everything they do revolves around their best player and unquestioned leader.
That's something. That's real. We're watching it almost every game.
"
Curry’s MVP case is very real. And with all due respect to his incredibly effective and talented teammates who are also getting consideration for various accolades, they just don’t come close to Curry’s chances of being named the Association’s best player in 2014-15.
All stats courtesy of Basketball-Reference.
Tim MacLean is a Featured Columnist for the Golden State Warriors. Follow him on Twitter for more Warriors and NBA content.
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