Kevin Durant thinks Joel Embiid should be the MVP. But the Nets star believes he should be part of the conversation, despite the time he missed due to injury.
“If I had to choose, I’d go Joel Embiid. He led the league in scoring, double-doubles, his team won 50 games … numbers were incredible,” Durant said before the Nets’ 115-108 play-in victory over the Cavaliers. “You can close your eyes and pick any one of the guys out of the top six or seven and you can have a good MVP. … But I’d go with Embiid if I had to choose.”
Durant’s 29.9 points per game would’ve been fourth in the league if he qualified for the scoring title, behind Embiid, LeBron James and Giannis Antetokounmpo. Despite missing 21 straight games with a sprained left MCL, he felt he should be right in that august group.
Kevin Durant and Joel Embiid Corey Sipkin“Oh, yeah,” Durant said. “I didn’t….the criteria I guess is play a lot, I don’t know, 70 percent of your games, 80 percent.”
While there is no threshold to be eligible for the MVP, Durant fell three games shy of qualifying for the statistical leaderboards like scoring champion, etc.
“Yeah that’s what I mean. My numbers don’t count if you would look … so I see why I’m not in that conversation,” Durant said. “But I’m sure there’s a lot of guys in the league that play MVP-caliber basketball for their clubs and that helped their clubs reach heights they probably never reached.
“There’s a lot of what-ifs in this game. If such-and-such didn’t get hurt, they would’ve have won this. If such-and-such bounced a different way they wouldn’t be looked at this way. … I felt I played at a level where I got better throughout the season, my teammates played well off of me and I played well off them. I felt like I approached every day like a most valuable player; that’s good enough for me.”
The Nets’ point differential jumps from 25th in games without Durant to sixth-best with him. After he returned from injury, they were third in Offensive Rating, fourth in point differential and fifth in Net Rating.
“Kevin would be my MVP for sure,” said Steve Nash, who won consecutive MVPs in 2005 and ’06. “I don’t know how many games someone has to play to be it, but Kevin’s incredible, what he does, and what he’s able to do to affect the game.”
