MVPs and the Best Teammates in the NBA

February 25, 2025

We're past All Star break in the NBA season, so the joy that is the MVP debate is in full swing. The latest straw poll from Bontemps has Shai firmly in the lead with 70% of first place votes.

Let's see how they're getting there. Historically, voters have looked at a combination of counting stats and team record. Let's see them for the top 4 candidates.

MVP Candidates Counting Stats

So by wins and points, SGA clearly has the edge, especially in per-minute impact with his having the highest points and lowest minutes.

More recently the nerds of the NBA have started using other metrics. One is on-court ratings - when you're playing, how many points do you score and give up. That's the offensive and defensive rating. Here it is.

Player On-Court Ratings

So the Nuggs with Joker have by 4.6 points the best offense, but their D isn't great, so Shai gets top net rating by 6 points, a huge margin. That alone could be a reason to put him 1st. And it shouldn't be surprising that hes got the best net, being the best player on a 66 win-pace team.

On-court ratings at least show the team performance while you're on the court, and don't bias towards players with terrible benches like raw plus/minus does. But it's still hugely impacted by a bunch of factors outside the player's control. Does the star player only play with other starters with hockey-style full bench lineups, or are they staggered with the bench unit? Also, how did you front office go in the off-season? Did they luck out and get you a dirt cheap Bruce Brown to play with? That's going to boost your ratings, but why should it impact your MVP case?

One stat which accounts more for team quality is Box Plus/Minus. In this stat, we're looking at all the players' box scores on the team, and comparing it to your team's success (overall efficiency rating). If you have way better stats than the rest of your team, and your team is great, you'll have a huge BPM. Let's see that.

MVP Candidates Box Plus/Minus

So Jokić has the clear edge in BPM. BPM is far more accurate than a traditional plus/minus of course, but it's still influenced by your teammates and their playstyles. If your teammates put up great counting stats, your BPM will be reduced, and if their stats are worse off, your score will be better. Maybe that's correct - someone is causing the team's good performance, right? But why does teammate performance have to impact the stat at all, and people's MVP votes?

Finally, let's just straight up look at who has the best and worst teammates. First, how do we rate the players? Well, we can take the wisdom of NBA 2K ratings. Here's the top 10.

NBA 2K25 Ratings

First let's look at how to evaluate the combined ratings of multiple players. We could just sum them up, but that's not quite right. You can't combine a Risacher (79) and a Dean Wade (75) to make a 154-rated player. To fix that, we can add weighting to the ratings so higher ratings are proportionally worth more. If we apply a 5x weighting, here's how the ratings compare.

So now Joker is still 65% better than the young guys. That's probably still too small. A weighting of 10 puts him over 4x more valuable than those guys, let's go with that.

Now Harden may have Kawhi on his team, but it doesn't matter if he never plays. So we need to combine the rating with minutes played together. Multiplying the minutes played together with the weighted rating, we can get the Most Valuable Teammate rating (MVT). Here's Joker's MVTs.

Nuggets Teammate Ratings

So Jamal is the MVT on the nuggs. That makes sense - despite his lower minutes, his higher rating still provides more value.

Note: this season he certainly hasn't provided as much value as others, and Win Shares shows this (Christian Braun is top), but looking forward to the playoffs, you still expect more value from Jamal's upside. That's where the 2K rating is surprisingly more useful than the VORPs and SCHNORPs.

So we can evaluate players' teammates. Now finally, which player has the best teammates in the league? Here's the top 10 VORPs and their teammates.

Top Ten Players' Teammates

No huge surprise that Tatum has the top teammates. The Celtics were often called last year the best starting five, and it's part of the reason he doesn't get serious MVP consideration. After that, the old Lakers duo of LeBron and AD boost each other up. That's over. But once Luka gets his minutes up (say next season) I'm sure it'll remain the same story for him and LeBron, until James is either traded or gets far worse.

Now to the MVPs. After all that, Jokic and Giannis have almost the same teammate value, and Shai's is not far behind. That's kind of surprising, for how deep OKC is. Giannis' score is boosted hugely by Dame, which makes sense for a 92-rated player he's sharing 68% of his minutes with. Joker is more balanced, with high minutes with Jamal, MPJ and CB all in the 83-86 rating range.

For Shai, he's getting more value from J Dub than Joker gets from any of his teammates. Jokic gets more help from his 2-5, but after that Shai's getting more again. This is largely a matter of rotations. Joker plays most of his minutes with his best teammates. For Shai, he's still playing 38.5% of his minutes with Aaron Wiggins and Isaiah Joe, rated 80 and 79. Let's try visualise that.

Well that shows it. The lines are extremely similar, and Joker's is actually lower, but Chet is a giant outlier. He's an 88 with only 17% of Shai's minutes, solely because of his injuries. In fact, 86% of Chet's minutes are with SGA. If he can stay on the floor, Shai's teammate rating will be huge. So huge in fact, that future years could see his MVP case diminished by improvements from Chet and J Dub.

None of that matters for this season's MVP. The facts are SGA he has an insane +18 net rating on the floor, with worse teammates than the Joker. Maybe despite Joker's tripe-double average and best-in-history PER, Shai does deserve it after all.