Watch Houston Rockets @ Milwaukee Bucks live on Sky Sports Arena late on Tuesday night (midnight)
Tuesday 26 March 2019 20:09, UK
The race for regular season MVP is down to two contenders, Giannis Antetokounmpo and James Harden. Sky Sports NBA analyst Mark Deeks examines both superstar's credentials.
Tonight, the Houston Rockets will take on the Milwaukee Bucks live on Sky Sports.
The Bucks are the NBA's best team. With a league-leading 55-19 record, this year's team is unrecognisable from last year's 44-38 squad, and the franchise that has not made it past the first round of the playoffs since the 2000-01 season look set to breeze past that.
The addition of star stretch five Brook Lopez over the summer helped, yet for the most part, Milwaukee has done this with the same core of players as before.
The Rockets, meanwhile, have greatly improved during the season. After starting 1-5, the Rockets limped along to a mere 11-14 record, and were themselves unrecognisable from last year's team that came up one successful three-pointer short of an NBA Finals appearance as recently as mid-January, when they sat at a decent but unthreatening 26-20.
Since then, however, they have won 21 of their last 28 games, including 14 of their last 16, to move up to 47-27 on the year, flying up to the third seed in the highly competitive Western Conference.
Notwithstanding the good role players around them, at the crux of both turnarounds are the phenomenal individual talents and performances of the respective superstars. In Giannis Antetokounmpo and James Harden, the Bucks and Rockets boast two of the game's very best players - the 29-year-old Harden has seven All-Star appearances to his credit, while Antetokounmpo has three already at the mere age of 24.
The annual NBA Most Valuable Player Award will be awarded after the season ends, and Harden is staking an incredibly strong claim to defending the crown he won last season.
Antetokounmpo's individual brilliance on the NBA's best team, however, is proving to be very tough competition.
Headed into tonight's match-up, how do the two fare and compare in the MVP race?
Considering that when he entered the league, he was a non-shooter with a loose handle and no post-up game, Giannis has become a phenomenal scorer. The offensively overmatched rookie who averaged only 10.0 points per 36 minutes is now tripling that at 30.0, while also vastly improving his efficiency year on year. He Is the relatively unique example of the player projected to be able to become dominant on both ends, who has actually done so.
True, Giannis is still limited by his sub-par jump shot. The fact that he is shooting 10 shots a game right at the rim is hugely to his credit, especially given that less than half of them are assisted; his unstoppable nature in transition and semi-transition, paired with his ever-increasing ability to manipulate the half court and change directions when moving at pace, sees him get to the rim seemingly at will with a long yet effortless stride. But when not able to do so, Antetokounmpo still struggles from outside, hitting only 24.4 per cent of his three-point attempts.
Nevertheless, although he is still a non-shooter, considering the construction of the team around him and his brilliance elsewhere, he may not ever need to be one. Knowing what Giannis wants to do is very different from being able to stop him doing it.
With greatly improved skill, strength and confidence, Giannis is a relentless attacker, ranking fifth in the league in scoring - ahead, even, of Kevin Durant. Trying to stop him is like trying to stop a train with a fishing rod.
This, though, is still some ways short of the historic scoring campaign that Harden is putting up. The number of scoring milestones that Harden has achieved this season is so long as to be almost incalculable.
Harden leads the league in scoring by a giant 8.2 points per game, greater than the margin from second-place (Stephen Curry) all the way down to 33rd (Nikola Jokic). He scored 30 or more points in 32 consecutive games, the second-longest streak ever behind only the anomaly that was Wilt Chamberlain. He has scored at least 30 points against each of the 29 other teams at least once, the first time it has ever happened. His 36.4 points per game is set to be the seventh-highest scoring season ever, behind five by Wilt and one by a young Michael Jordan.
Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The list can, and indeed does, go on. Yet the above alone is a very strong indicator of the exceptional work Harden has done offensively this season.
SIGNIFICANT EDGE: Harden
Given he is his team's dominant ball-handler in the half-court, moreso than Antetokounmpo is, Harden inevitably leads in this category.
Although his assist rates have gone down considerably from the 11.2 assists per game he averaged two seasons ago, this is more due to the addition of Chris Paul and the loss of role-playing scoring weapons around him than it is any decline or disinclination on Harden's part.
SLIGHT EDGE: Harden
Defense, as ever, is hard to capture statistically. The historical metrics of steals and blocks tell only part of the story - after all, if a player tries too hard to record these numbers resulting in giving up their position and easy points for the opposition, or plays excellent positional defense to force a miss without ever needing to get their hand on the ball, then in both cases the metric belies their impact.
That said, the basic numbers speak to the transcendent versatility Giannis offers on that end. In a switch-heavy era, Antetokounmpo is the ideal tool for the job, able to cover ground on the perimeter and in the mid-range areas while also being the rim deterrent when Lopez is not around.
His length and agility make him able to defend in space, and his much-developed strength allows him to both take and give bumps where required. He plays the roaming defense of Andrei Kirilenko while having the strength to body up, and the offensive game to boot.
Historically, Harden's defense was so poor as to be meme-worthy. His languid defensive efforts were regularly the subject of ridicule, either lazily swiping at the ball in lieu of playing good positional defense, or sometimes just not trying at all. If you search for "James Harden defense/defence", these montages are still the top results.
Over the last couple of years, though, it has improved. And this year, despite the huge scoring burden on him, Harden has upped his defense further. He exerts more ball pressure, makes better and more regular plays on the ball, and competes. Gone are the highlights of him standing still as a man drives by. At this point, Harden is a plenty adequate NBA defensive player. In individual possessions, he is actually quite good.
Nonetheless, Harden's improved defense still does not compare to Giannis. He is not just called the 'Greek Freak' because it rhymes.
SIGNIFICANT EDGE: Giannis
Whereas Harden leads the league in many individual categories, Giannis leads the league in versatility, and his team leads the league in wins.
There is a time-honoured theory that the Most Valuable Player award should be the best player on the best team. The Milwaukee Bucks are the NBA's best team, and Giannis Antetokounmpo is by far the best player on it, and not only would the Bucks not be the NBA's best team without him, they would also not be anywhere close. As unprovable as that is, it is also indisputable, and that alone carries significant weight in the MVP debate.
Nevertheless, the Most Valuable Player Award is an individual award, not a team-based one. And while there is nothing to say that offensive abilities are more heavily favoured over defensive ones - notwithstanding the fact that there is a separate award for Defensive Player of the Year, which rather heavily implies it - even the most gifted individuals can only alter their team's fortunes up to a point.
Everyone needs commensurate and plentiful talents around them.
Ultimately, this is a subjective award that can only be decided accordingly. There exists no blueprint nor template for what goes into determining the league's most valuable player - even the idea that it should be synonymous to the league's best player in a given season is far from automatic - and when two strikingly different players of such calibre as this, that subjectivity is tested fully.
There exist few metrics that accurately capture a player's overall impact on a game, and in those that do, there is no meaningful separation between them. For example, Harden has 13.3 win shares on the season; Giannis has 13.4.
Even when resorting to using per-36-minute data, matters are extremely close. Per 36 minutes, Harden averages 35.3 points, 6.2 rebounds, 7.3 assists, 2.1 steals and 0.7 blocks per game; Antetokounmpo (who averages 4.3 minutes per game less than The Beard) averages 30.0, 13.8, 6.6, 1.4 and 1.6 respectively.
As aesthetically jarring as it has been at times, Harden's isolation-heavy scoring fury has been exactly what his team needs. His nuance in knowing when to attack the rim, draw fouls, raise up from three, knowing when to dump the ball off to a big man finisher and knowing when to kick from a shooter, almost all of which he does from a standing start, is as unstoppable of a package as Giannis is in transition.
Similarly, a player who can play any position both offensively and defensively to such a high standard as Antetokounmpo can, the truly versatile tool who can pair with, dominate and defend anyone is as valuable as the player who can simply outscore the opposition.
Tonight's head to head between the two teams, then, should see quite the battle.
After all, if there is one thing that seems certain, it is that this year's Most Valuable Player Award will be one of these two.
Watch Giannis and Harden face off when the Houston Rockets visit the Milwaukee Bucks, live on Sky Sports Arena late on Tuesday night (midnight).
