Where does Giannis rank in the NBA MVP race?

The two-time MVP has the best per-game stats of his career, averaging 31.2 points per game (fourth-best in the NBA) and 11.9 rebounds per game (second) while leading the Milwaukee Bucks to the best record in the NBA despite playing without Khris Middleton for nearly two-thirds of the season.

As a result, Giannis ranks third in odds to win the MVP at Caesars Sportsbook with over 600, behind clear favorites Nikola Jokic and Joel Embiid.

However, some of the same player value metrics that rated Antetokounmpo as the league’s best player when he was winning the MVP no longer have him as valuable this season. What explains this disconnect?

“Why don’t the all-in-one stats show Giannis Antetokounmpo as one of the most valuable players in the league this season?”

–Jackson

Perhaps the clearest example of this trend is Dunksandthrees.com’s estimated plus-minus (EPM). Still in 2020, Giannis’ 8.9-plus EPM led the NBA during his second MVP campaign. Antetokounmpo was third last season behind Jokic and Embiid. However, this season, his plus-6.8 MWE ranks eighth.

Something similar happens with Basketball-Reference.com’s box plus-minus, which only includes box score data. After leading the league in 2019-20 and ranking second behind Jokic the past two seasons, Giannis falls to sixth. Antetokounmpo is even lower (13th) in FiveThirtyEight’s Raptor, which acknowledges that this model hasn’t rated him that well historically (only third in 2019-20).

The exception is BBall-Index’s LeBron metric, where Antetokounmpo ranks second, albeit with a lower rating than any of the previous four seasons.

The easy part of the explanation is that Giannis’ production has come in a much different way than the past four seasons. With Middleton absent much of the season, his 39% usage is a personal best and the highest in the NBA. However, Antetokounmpo’s true shooting percentage (TS%) of .598 is his worst since Mike Budenholzer’s arrival in 2018-19, the same season he became an MVP candidate.

Historically, the rule of thumb is that increasing a player’s usage rate by one percentage point should cause a drop of about .005 in his true shooting percentage, holding the skill constant. Thus, Giannis’ drop from last season (.035) is larger than one would expect simply due to his increased role (.020), before considering that the league as a whole scored more efficiently this season.

Relative to the league average, according to Basketball-Reference.com, Antetokounmpo’s TS% has gone from 12% better in 2021-22 to just 3% this season. As a result, despite scoring at the highest rate of his career, Giannis has created less value as a scorer than he has over the past four seasons.

The other factor is perhaps more surprising to those who don’t watch Giannis every night: his steal and block rates are the lowest of his career. Antetokounmpo, who often plays alongside Brook Lopez after being Milwaukee’s primary rim protector with Lopez sidelined much of last season, is blocking opponents’ 2-point attempts half as often as he did last season, and is still more than 33% lower than in previous seasons with Lopez.

For most of these metrics, stats are only half of the equation. They also take into account how teams fare with a player on and off the court, adjusted for teammates and opponents. That’s where you might think Antetokounmpo dominates, given the Bucks’ record and injuries. However, this season Milwaukee has had the lowest on- and off-court differential with Antetokounmpo (plus-7.3 points per 100 possessions) since 2016-17, according to NBA Advanced Stats.

In this case, I think the metrics are undervaluing Antetokounmpo to some extent. The Bucks have shot slightly better on three-pointers with Antetokounmpo on the bench (37%) than on the court (36%). While it’s tempting to say it’s due to their poor three-point shooting (28% this season), Second Spectrum’s analysis suggests Milwaukee looks better with Giannis at the rim.

In that context, it’s interesting to look at Antetokounmpo’s regularized adjusted plus-minus (RAPM) from NBAshotcharts.com. The site presents two versions of the single-season RAPM, and Giannis fares better on the one that incorporates 3-point luck (he ranks seventh in the league, behind only Jokic, among serious MVP contenders) than the one that doesn’t (28th).