Does Gobert Deserve MVP Buzz For Fueling No. 1 Jazz?

Gobert just completed a dominant season, writes Isaac Adams. (Jesse D. Garrabrant via espn.com)

The Jazz sent out packs of customized zines to NBA awards voters this week and they are awesome. Just one thing, the zine they sent for Rudy Gobert was for consideration for “DPOY & ALL-NBA.” It’s incredible to me that they didn’t list MVP as well because he’s absolutely deserving of MVP votes.

DPOY & ALL-NBA: @rudygobert27 🔮 pic.twitter.com/19LIOr4fxe

— utahjazz (@utahjazz) May 17, 2021

Best Player on the Best Team

Don’t worry, I’m well aware that Nikola Jokic will actually win the award. I think it will be near unanimous. That doesn’t mean Gobert isn’t deserving of serious consideration here. The NBA doesn’t provide specific criteria for what qualifies as an MVP but as much as the voters claim that it is more than just the best player on the best team, most years it is exactly that. Of the 65 players to have won the MVP award since the NBA started handing out the hardware in 1956, 40 would accurately be described as the best player on the league’s best regular season team that year. In the 25 seasons when the best player on the best team didn’t win MVP he was runner-up 9 times and third place 6 times. There have only been six times in 65 seasons when the best player on the best team did not finish top-5 in MVP voting. Just by nature of being the best player on the best team in the NBA this season, Gobert should be getting serious MVP consideration.

Per Minute Impact

But his case is far stronger than just being the best player on the best team. The Athletic’s John Hollinger helped lay out that case in his awards piece in which he gave Gobert the nod as runner-up to Denver’s likely MVP¹. “[Gobert]’s been a top-five player this season by virtually every per-minute impact stat and, as with Jokic,” Hollinger wrote. “[He] has a huge minutes edge on nearly every other MVP contender.” Let’s take a look a some of those impact stats Hollinger mentioned:

The above listed advanced metrics each use different data points including box score and tracking data along with various adjustments to account for confounding factors like teammates to measure a player’s impact and they all agree that Rudy Gobert is a top-5 player this season. As Hollinger mentioned in his piece, these metrics measure a player’s estimated impact on a per minute basis, meaning that the more minutes the player is on the court the more impact (i.e. value) that player is likely to have overall.

Gobert has had a greater per-minute impact than nearly any other player in the NBA this season and he played 2,187 minutes. That’s more minutes than any of Stephen Curry, Joel Embiid, Luka Doncic or Damian Lillard played, the players currently with the 2nd through 5th best odds for MVP. When you account for the number of games that Gobert sat early because the Jazz were so dominant with him playing, that fact is even more impressive. If you have any faith in the ability of advanced statistics to measure a player’s impact, Gobert should be much higher on everybody’s ballot than he seems. Despite his impact, Gobert is currently in a 7-way tie for the 13th best odds to win MVP according to DraftKings.com. 

Best Defensive Season in Modern NBA History

As Ben Dowsett noted in his recent piece for FiveThirtyEight, Gobert just finished what was possibly the greatest defensive season in modern NBA history and he will almost certainly be rewarded with his third Defensive Player of the Year award in four seasons as a result. Gobert finished the season with the best marks in the history of several stats Dowsett highlighted: D-EPM, D-LEBRON, D-RAPTOR and D-RPM. The natural caveat is that advanced defensive stats are notoriously flawed, something that Zach Kram addressed in a recent deep-dive for The Ringer. As Daniel Myers, the creator of the advanced box-plus minus stat (BPM) told Kram for that article, “If you look at all of them together, hopefully the blind spots offset each other.” Kram goes on to note that “if all the metrics are in general agreement, such as with Gobert… that unanimity should inspire more confidence in the conclusion.”

That Gobert finished as the top ranked player in four of the highest quality public defensive stats is incredible and we can have some confidence in those metrics based on that unanimity. “Several consensus all-time defensive greats show up among the best seasons tracked by one metric or another, but no single player-season is quite a consistent presence atop all of them,” Dowsett wrote. “No single player-season, that is, except Rudy Gobert’s 2020-21 campaign.”

Gobert is exactly the kind of player who is unlikely to get MVP votes. While more and more analysts are recognizing Gobert’s centrality to the Jazz’s offense without touching the ball, that impact doesn’t show up in a box score. Screen assists are widely mocked but that’s because their impact has been overstated, not because they don’t have value at all. There is no reliable metric that fully accounts for how Gobert’s rim-diving gravity provides spacing for his teammates to work in. Even with an increased offensive impact, Gobert’s primary value is on the defensive end and that’s notoriously hard to measure, you need only look at how many smart basketball minds value “versatility” above all to recognize that.

Overcoming Adversity

The Jazz ended the season with 52 wins and the NBA’s best record despite missing 19 games from All-Star Donovan Mitchell and 21 games from All-Star Mike Conley. Of course, other teammates like Joe Ingles and Bojan Bogdanovic stepped up in significant ways to keep the Jazz in first place, but Gobert remained the fulcrum upon which the Jazz moved throughout their absences.

In the 29 games where Gobert played but one or both of Mitchell or Conley did not, the Jazz went 22-7 (.759), an even better mark than their overall .722 win percentage. In Gobert’s nine games without either of the star guards, the Jazz went 6-3, a .667 record that would project to a 55-win pace over a typical 82-game season. That is better than the Jazz finished last year and good enough to finish at or above all other teams in the league this season except Philadelphia and Phoenix.

The Jazz ended up in a tight contest with the Suns for the best record in the NBA but the Suns had good to great health from most of their key players through the season. The Suns All-Star back court of Chris Paul and Devin Booker missed a total of seven combined games, two of which are accounted for by the Suns deciding to rest their starters in the final game of the season. Had the situations been reversed and the Jazz had their All-Star back court for all but a few games and the Suns missed theirs for more than a quarter of the season, it’s hard to imagine there would have been any rice for the top record.

According to Cleaning the Glass, the Jazz’s point differential when Gobert was on the court this season was the equivalent to the point differential of a 72-win team. In other words, when Gobert was on the court the Jazz were playing on a level similar to the 1996 Bulls and 2016 Warriors. That’s value.

Positively the Best

Outside of advanced impact stats and the traditional box score there is another quite simple stat that measures impact. The NBA has tracked plus-minus data back to the 1996-1997 season. Raw +/- is about as straightforward as stats come too, there’s nothing complicated about it. It’s just how many more points a team scores when a given player is on the court than when he is off.

Raw +/- is often criticized for being too simplistic. Especially when using small sample sizes there is a lot of noise in the stat and a myriad of factors that can affect why a team is scoring more when a player is on the court than off. However, with the robust sample size of a full NBA season, there is less noise and valuable signal from +/-. In the 24 years that the NBA has tracked +/- prior to this season, 20 of the 24 league leaders in +/- are first-ballot Hall of Famers and have won at least one MVP award in their career. Just look at the names on this chart:

The four names on the list who never won an MVP obviously stand out. Of course, we just learned that Paul Pierce is a first ballot Hall-of-Famer despite never winning MVP. In 2007-08 Pierce also played alongside Kevin Garnett, a 2-time MVP and first-ballot Hall of Famer. Playing next to an MVP-winner also explains how Draymond Green (likely first ballot Hall-of-Famer in his own right) and Eric Gordon made the list, they shared the majority of their minutes next to James Harden and Stephen Curry in those years.

That leaves just one true outlier among a list of All-Time great NBA players like Michael Jordan, LeBron James, Tim Duncan, Shaquille O’Neal and Stephen Curry: Tayshaun Prince. Here’s a list of the players who finished 1-5th in raw +/- in 2006: Tayshaun Prince (+647), Rasheed Wallace (+615), Ben Wallace (+599), Chauncey Billups (+588), Rip Hamilton (+519). You may recognize that group as the 2006 Pistons starting 5 with the largest gap between players being 128 between Rip Hamilton and Tayshaun Prince. How did Tayshaun Prince make it on a list that otherwise consists of MVPs or teammates who shared the court with them? He played with one hell of a starting lineup, including future Hall-of-Famer Ben Wallace, that’s how.

This season, Rudy Gobert finished the season  as the league leader in +/- with a total of +728. That is far and away the best +/- in the NBA this season. While fellow Jazzmen Conley (+548), Royce O’Neale (+473) and Ingles (+452) finishing 2nd-4th on this list is evidence of how great the Jazz starting lineup was this season (Bogdanovic finished 7th at +419) Gobert’s place as a +/- leader can be readily distinguished from Prince’s as the difference between Gobert and Conley on the list is greater than the difference between Prince’s league leading +/- and Rip Hamilton’s 5th place +/- in 2006.

So, if he’s not like Prince then there’s a good case he belongs in one of the other two categories we’ve seen in the last quarter century: Rudy Gobert is either an MVP caliber player or he is teammates with one. Mike Conley has had a long enough career that I think he’s safe enough to eliminate as an MVP-caliber player, especially when considering that he missed 21 games this season. That leaves the Jazz’s third All-Star, Donovan Mitchell as the only other candidate for an MVP-caliber teammate. But much like Conley, Mitchell missed a significant chunk of the season at 19 games and his total +/- was the lowest among the Jazz starting five at +287. I hope that Mitchell reaches his full potential and becomes an MVP-caliber player, I just don’t think there’s a strong argument that he’s there yet.

So, that leaves Gobert in a class all his own or in a class among Hall-of-Fame and MVP level players who have also ended a season as the league leader in +/-. LeBron James only ever finished one season (2008-09) with a higher total +/- than 2020-21 Rudy Gobert. Tim Duncan only did it once too (2007). Shaquille O’Neal never did. While his impact and value doesn’t always show up on a traditional box score there is so much that Gobert does on the basketball court that just makes the Jazz better and he took it to another level this season. That’s what I call value and that’s why I consider Gobert as the single most valuable player in the NBA this season.

Good Company

Gobert is unlikely to finish in the top 5 of MVP voting this year. He probably won’t even finish top 10 if betting odds are to believed. That would be a damn shame because he deserves first-place votes and should be, at worst, the runner-up to Jokic who has had a historic season in his own right.

Oh well. I suspect that when this year’s MVP is announced and the votes are revealed, Gobert will join 1989 Isiah Thomas and 2014 Tim Duncan as only the third “best player on the best team” to finish outside the top 10 in MVP votes. Ultimately, I think those guys ended up pretty happy with how their seasons ended even if the voters didn’t recognize their greatness in those seasons. Let’s hope Gobert can join them in that as well.