Did Lebron get robbed of League MVP again?

[PhoSita]

No.


It's a regular season award.

Harden was the most productive, most difficult to defend player on the best regular season team in the league.

No brainer MVP.

[Sophomore]

Yes.

LeBron contributed more to his team, which was a much weaker team. Offer the Rockets a trade of LeBron for Harden and they would have done it in a heartbeat, even considering only the regular season. Also, a disproportionate share of Harden’s numbers were due to a style of play the league should not reward with its highest honor: drawing fouls where a player isn’t actually trying to put the ball in the basket.

[PaulAllen]

If you remove Lebron from the Cavs they are easily the worst team in the league... nuff said

This isn't true at all. They have a legitimate All-Star in Kevin Love. They would still scrap 35-40 wins

haha... go back and look at the Wolves record when Love was the feature piece

[Monkhouse]

If you remove Lebron from the Cavs they are easily the worst team in the league... nuff said

This isn't true at all. They have a legitimate All-Star in Kevin Love. They would still scrap 35-40 wins

haha... go back and look at the Wolves record when Love was the feature piece

When Love was the featured piece, they went 40-42. This is all while starting K-Mart, Rubio, Brewer, and Pekovic as their starting 5.... It is even astounding they won 30+ games with that roster.. The West was also stacked that year...

They were ranked 9th in offensive rating, and were the best team to not make the playoffs.

Do people just say things mindlessly? Love wasn't the problem, if it wasn't for him, they would end up in the bottom 5.

[Monkhouse]

To answer OP's question, no.

LeBron wasn't better than Harden. He didn't make his teammates better, and he wasn't a leader. Harden literally shot his TS% through the roof, and spearheaded the best offense/best ranked team at 65-17.

Harden should've won it a few years ago, but now he finally has.

[Moranis]

If you remove Lebron from the Cavs they are easily the worst team in the league... nuff said

This isn't true at all. They have a legitimate All-Star in Kevin Love. They would still scrap 35-40 wins

haha... go back and look at the Wolves record when Love was the feature piece

When Love was the featured piece, they went 40-42. This is all while starting K-Mart, Rubio, Brewer, and Pekovic as their starting 5.... It is even astounding they won 30+ games with that roster.. The West was also stacked that year...

They were ranked 9th in offensive rating, and were the best team to not make the playoffs.

Do people just say things mindlessly? Love wasn't the problem, if it wasn't for him, they would end up in the bottom 5.

That is actually a pretty solid starting 5.  People forget how good Pekovic was before the injuries finally took their toll.  Martin was a very strong offensive player and Rubio has always been a very solid ball handler/play maker.  Brewer is your classic solid defender who does a little bit of everything (a nice glue guy - he wasn't a good 3 point shooter then, though is much better at it now).  They had a pretty solid bench overall with Barea, Budinger, Dieng, Mbah a Moute, Cunningham, and Turiaf.  That team was a pretty solid team, though obviously Love was the catalyst. 

[rocknrollforyoursoul]

I'm no LeBron fan, but I think he should've won MVP every year he's been in the league, because he's been the best player every year he's been in the league. He may not always have the best numbers, but he's easily the best player.

[Monkhouse]

If you remove Lebron from the Cavs they are easily the worst team in the league... nuff said

This isn't true at all. They have a legitimate All-Star in Kevin Love. They would still scrap 35-40 wins

haha... go back and look at the Wolves record when Love was the feature piece

When Love was the featured piece, they went 40-42. This is all while starting K-Mart, Rubio, Brewer, and Pekovic as their starting 5.... It is even astounding they won 30+ games with that roster.. The West was also stacked that year...

They were ranked 9th in offensive rating, and were the best team to not make the playoffs.

Do people just say things mindlessly? Love wasn't the problem, if it wasn't for him, they would end up in the bottom 5.

That is actually a pretty solid starting 5.  People forget how good Pekovic was before the injuries finally took their toll.  Martin was a very strong offensive player and Rubio has always been a very solid ball handler/play maker.  Brewer is your classic solid defender who does a little bit of everything (a nice glue guy - he wasn't a good 3 point shooter then, though is much better at it now).  They had a pretty solid bench overall with Barea, Budinger, Dieng, Mbah a Moute, Cunningham, and Turiaf.  That team was a pretty solid team, though obviously Love was the catalyst.

Hence, the 9th ranked offense. They were 1-8 in very close games. Coincidentally, Kevin Love was also 1-6 in close tight situations, which means as great as Love was, they relied too much on him. Great scoring team by team effort, but Pekovic is a big that eventually got cut off from the NBA within a few years due to injuries and being unable to defend anyone. Martin was deemed one of the worst defenders in the NBA. Rubio was above average ball handler/play maker, but he played the passing lanes too much to put too much emphasis on defense.

Like I said, that team was pretty solid/above average offensively, just horrible on the defensive end. Also Pekovic, and Martin were no longer able to make up for their shoddy defense by their offense, Pekovic was the slowest big men as evidenced by him being one of the heaviest centers at the time.

The Wolves split two-game series with Boston, Charlotte, Washington, Atlanta, New York, Orlando and Cleveland. They also spit a pair of four-game series with Sacramento and Denver out West. That's 22 games of .500 basketball against weak competition.

They had their chances to make their record better, and past the heavily recited "record by 4 points or less" issue were the issues behind winning games they were supposed to win.

There was a stretch in mid-January when the Timberwolves, 16-17 at the time, had their best chance to make themselves a real player in the playoff push. The schedule looked like this:

Philadelphia, Phoenix, Charlotte, San Antonio, Sacramento, Toronto, Utah, Utah. Based on the way the season ended, going 5-3 would have been expected, but 1 extra win in there was plausible. The Wolves went 4-4, making zero ground in the push.

Obviously, a few more stabs at those lowly Eastern Conference squads would have likely resulted in less split series, but it's tough to look away from the numbers.

"I don't think I can call Kevin Love a superstar until he gets his team to the playoffs. His supporting cast this year isn't that bad."

This might be the topic that irks me more than any other. According to nbawowy.com, when Kevin Love was on the floor, the Timberwolves were +356. When Kevin Love was on the bench, the Wolves -134. I toyed around with this site a bit, and there weren't any other superstars with that big of a gap.

[Big333223]

As I said above, I think Harden was the MVP this year. But...

I wonder what the outcome would've been if everything happened exactly the same way this year but Harden had won last season over Westbrook (as he should've).

Instead of the overwhelming "he's due" narrative surrounding Harden, he would already have one and the "now he has Chris Paul" would've been a starker narrative counterpoint to James' lack of help. I have a feeling James might have won this year, even if everything was the same, if Harden had won it last season.

But then, if Westbrook hadn't won it last year and put up a second consecutive season with a triple double, the "how can you not give it to him he averaged a triple double!!" noise we heard last year would've been even louder. In spite of OKC's trouble, could he have snuck in?

[greece66]

https://www.slamonline.com/nba/kyrie-irving-lebron-james-2017-18-mvp/

IMO saying "Lebron is the ppl's MVP" is a poor (but very Kyrie-esque) choice of words. Saying that it is unclear what the MVP stands for is a better point.

Also, I found ESPN's title to be annoyingly misleading.

[byennie]

If you remove Lebron from the Cavs they are easily the worst team in the league... nuff said

This isn't true at all. They have a legitimate All-Star in Kevin Love. They would still scrap 35-40 wins

haha... go back and look at the Wolves record when Love was the feature piece

When Love was the featured piece, they went 40-42. This is all while starting K-Mart, Rubio, Brewer, and Pekovic as their starting 5.... It is even astounding they won 30+ games with that roster.. The West was also stacked that year...

They were ranked 9th in offensive rating, and were the best team to not make the playoffs.

Do people just say things mindlessly? Love wasn't the problem, if it wasn't for him, they would end up in the bottom 5.

That is actually a pretty solid starting 5.  People forget how good Pekovic was before the injuries finally took their toll.  Martin was a very strong offensive player and Rubio has always been a very solid ball handler/play maker.  Brewer is your classic solid defender who does a little bit of everything (a nice glue guy - he wasn't a good 3 point shooter then, though is much better at it now).  They had a pretty solid bench overall with Barea, Budinger, Dieng, Mbah a Moute, Cunningham, and Turiaf.  That team was a pretty solid team, though obviously Love was the catalyst.

No way. Maybe a deep squad, but for starters those are not good players.

Martin was arguably the worst defender in the entire league.
Pekovic missed 28 games and was also a poor defender.
Rubio shot 38% for the year.
Brewer never played that many minutes the rest of his career, because he's a role player.
They were forced to start Ronny Turiaf at center... 10 times.

That team was 90% Kevin Love who put up an insane 26/13/4 on just 18 shots. He was MVP-caliber.

[nickagneta]

If you remove Lebron from the Cavs they are easily the worst team in the league... nuff said

This isn't true at all. They have a legitimate All-Star in Kevin Love. They would still scrap 35-40 wins

haha... go back and look at the Wolves record when Love was the feature piece

When Love was the featured piece, they went 40-42. This is all while starting K-Mart, Rubio, Brewer, and Pekovic as their starting 5.... It is even astounding they won 30+ games with that roster.. The West was also stacked that year...

They were ranked 9th in offensive rating, and were the best team to not make the playoffs.

Do people just say things mindlessly? Love wasn't the problem, if it wasn't for him, they would end up in the bottom 5.

When Love was the Timberpuppies number one guy the best they ever did was that 40-42 season. In seasons Love was the Wolves best player Minnesota won

24, 15, 17, 26, 31 and 40 games. Counting on Love to be a number one guy and produce might be a bad idea for your team winning games.

[Celtics4ever]

It is karmic for all the travels and goal tends he gets away with.   The league is starting to think about the next generation.