Posted by Nalod:
THe argument for Nash statistically is they have 3 new starters this year, and they have four players all having career years.
Nash had a career year last season, and he wasn't just playing with 3 new starters-- he was playing with a whole new team. Before then it was inconceivable that a player of Nash's caliber would ever be considered for MVP. Why the leap? Among other things, he came to a new system, coach D'Antoni's system, which was ideally suited to his talents and the talents of others. So how can one so readily credit Nash with all the glory for his team's play? How do we know that Boris Diaw, for instance, wouldn't have had a fantastic breakout season in D'Antoni's system even without Nash? After all, D'Antoni's system is a large part of what made the difference for Nash himself in the first place.
This is just to say that the analyses of Nash's effect on his team that I've seen are almost universally too simplistic and naive. No doubt Nash has a huge impact on his team's level of play, but so does their coach, so does Marion, etc. Nash deserves a lot of credit, but not all of it-- a large chunk of Nash's share probably rightfully belongs to D'Antoni, and to a lesser extent, his still underrated teammates like Marion and Diaw.
On balance, I see Nash on a par with Billups as far as MVP candidacy goes-- firmly second tier. He has no business winning it this season and had no business winning it last season. Simply put, if Nash really deserved to win MVP this season over Dirk, Kobe, LeBron, and Wade, then Stockton was robbed of several MVP awards in his day by his contemporaries. The gap between this season's top players and the MVPs of the early/mid 90s is not as big as the gap between Nash and Stockton, since Stockton matched Nash's prowess on offense while actually playing defense as well. Nash at best is half the player Stockton was. Fantastic player, but not an MVP.
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