Stephen Curry the likely recipient, but James Harden would be a worthy winner of NBA’s MVP award

The trickiest part of settling this year’s NBA MVP debate may simply be choosing how one wishes to define “valuable”.

There are three leading contenders for basketball’s top individual honour this season, and each case seems to rely around some individually nuanced interpretation of value.

Stephen Curry, the Golden State Warriors point guard, is the best player on the best team, not infrequently a standard used to settle “most valuable”. He’s also a fan favourite, an emerging face for the league’s marketing arm and a wonderfully balletic performer who could credibly be labelled uniquely skilled in today’s game.

For these reasons, Curry is most likely to win. But should he really?

There are, of course, the other competing interpretations of “most valuable”. There is an argument in the cold, hard math of the game’s rising statistician class, which, as it happens, this year favours the Houston Rockets’ James Harden.

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There is also an argument that the award should be given to the “best player”, that is, the one who exhibits night-to-night dominance, provides the most singularly transcendent performances and could in short be defined as the most individually talented player, which this season has been Russell Westbrook of the Oklahoma City Thunder.

LeBron James, a kind of nebulous combination of all three interpretations, seems to lack any widespread support this season, but he definitely shouldn’t be dismissed as easily as it seems he has been.

In any case, those are the lines of thought swirling around the MVP debate this year, a debate that, while maybe not necessarily more contentious than in the past, does seem more lively thanks to the power of social media and the subsequent proliferation of voices in the debate. That, at least, is a good and fun thing for basketball.

But, again, how to settle it?

“Valuable” as a concept should be measureable, and having the “most” of it should outweight stylistic preference or isolated excellence.

The resistance to Harden’s case has largely arisen from those impulses. That the beauty (and certainly undeniable quality) of Curry’s game or the ferociousness and passion of Westbrook’s should be the tiebreaker in a close statistical contest.

But it’s a contest that, while incredibly close, should be clearly cut.

By many, if not nearly all, of the measurements that attempt to discern all-around “value”, from ESPN’s WAR to BasketballReference’s win shares, Harden is the best in the game this year.

But maybe you don’t trust advanced metrics so much yet. Fine, Harden has the most points in basketball this year, with over 250 more than second-placed Curry. He trails Curry in assists, on a team much less-equipped to convert them, by only 62.

Moreover Harden has played the second-most minutes, over 300 more than Curry. Surely, if one accepts Harden has been at least nearly as excellent as Curry this season, contributing his excellence for the equivalent of six-plus more full games counts for something?

Harden has finally played half-decent defence for the first time in his career to lead a team that, without him, might not even be in the Western Conference play-offs at all, let alone fighting for the second seed.

Subtract any other player from the Rockets, and Houston still outscore their opponents by points per 100 possessions. Subtract Harden, and they get outscored by 3.6 points per 100, a rate that would line up just ahead of the Denver Nuggets for eighth-worst in the league.

Curry’s numbers might be hampered in being surrounded by enough talent that he doesn’t have to carry as much weight by himself as Harden.

Westbrook’s numbers are definitely hampered by having played over 10 less games than Curry and Harden. But to what extent regarding both is virtually unknowable.

What is known is that Harden is a volume producer, and this season the volume simply adds up to a slight bit more than Curry’s elegance or Westbrook’s relentlessness. With due fairness to Curry, it’s very, very close.

But Harden, with his game cold and calculating, has the edge in the cold, calculating figures that reflect his effectiveness.

By the hard, measureable definition of “value”, James Harden simply has the most of it this year.

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