The 2022-23 NBA MVP race will be remembered as one of the dumbest and most obnoxious MVP races in history. The three frontrunners for the award, Nikola Jokic, Joel Embiid, and Giannis Antetokounmpo, have built exceptional cases to lay claim to the NBA’s most prestigious regular season award, and the public and media have done their darndest to make the majority of what they’re accomplishing as toxic and horrible as possible.
Instead of acknowledging that you can make a compelling argument for each player and gawking at just how absurd each has been, people have degraded themselves to slinging mud. The recipient of the most anti-MVP chatter has been Nikola Jokic. As the defending two-time MVP, Jokic was always going to face an uphill battle to become the fourth player in NBA history to win three consecutive MVPs and the first since Larry Bird from 1983-84 to 1985-86.
There have been a host of arguments against his candidacy that range from perfectly legitimate to patently absurd, but the one that I have found the most aggravating centers on his passing. A common Jokic-MVP disqualifier goes like this: Embiid and Giannis are better at scoring and defense, and Jokic is just a better passer. Embiid and Giannis are better at two things than Jokic, and Jokic is only better at one. Ergo, they are the superior players.
While I find these binary arguments incredibly lazy, I also find the subtext that passing is of lesser importance than scoring aggravating. Basketball is a team sport, and passing is what connects it all together. Thanks to the decades-long fetishization of volume scorers, it’s not altogether surprising that passing has been relegated to a secondary offensive skill in the public consciousness, but that doesn’t mean it’s based in reality.
To try and compare the value of scoring next to passing, I took the top-28 players in passes per game and field goal attempts per game and measured their team’s offensive rating with them on and off the court.
(The two 28-player samples included two players in each that changed teams during the season. I didn’t include their on-off offensive ratings, so in reality, it is a 26-player sample. The data was collected a few days before publication so the numbers have shifted minimally)
Top-9 Passers by Volume
Top-9 Shooters by Volume
When the top passers by volume are on the court, their teams have an average offensive rating of 117.28. When the top shooters by volume are on the court, their teams post an average offensive rating of 117.42. A difference of 0.14 points per 100 possession is negligible and suggests that elite passing and shooting volume have a nearly identical effect on their team’s offensive output. However, teams need a bucket-getter to get buckets, so what happens when they’re on the pine?
When the top passers are on the sidelines, their team’s offensive rating drops to 112.31, and when the top shooters hit the bench, their team’s offensive rating drops to 112.52. The average drop in offensive rating for the top passers is 4.97 and 4.54 for the top shooters. Once again, these metrics are almost identical. It appears, ever so slightly, that teams suffer a bit more when their top passer is out of the game, but only a computer can spot a difference of 0.43 points per 100 possessions.
These results highlight what makes basketball such an entertaining and compelling product– it is a team sport that is regularly dominated by an individual. A great passer who connects their team’s offense together and a dominant scorer who can make a defender seem invisible are engaged in seemingly polar opposite activities but are generating similar results. The duality of man is always a compelling narrative, and basketball containing a stark duality, without clear supremacy, is a magnificent built-in narrative to exploit.
Going back to the MVP race. What Nikola Jokic, Tyrese Haliburton, James Harden, and others, for that matter, are doing as passers should be celebrated in the same way that we herald the scoring exploits of Joel Embiid, Giannis Antetokounmpo, and Jayson Tatum. So while it’s fair to suggest that Jokic is an inferior scorer to Giannis and Embiid, and it’s downright true that his defense is inferior, it isn’t fair to dismiss his passing edge as a minor feather in his cap.
This isn’t a Jokic for MVP article, but the discussion around the MVP and each of the top-three contenders’ candidacy shows a deep undervaluing of passing by the general basketball community. Elite high-volume passers and elite high-volume shooters, in general, lead their teams to similar offensive outcomes. So the next time you watch a game and you feel the urge to say, “He needs to shoot more.” Stop and remember that the fork in the road of passing and shooting leads to the same destination– buckets at about 117.3 points per 100 possessions.