Post by eric on Feb 18, 2019 17:44:57 GMT
With Giannis being the MVP favorite and threatening to win All-Star MVP last night I wondered how often players "do the double".
h/t www.basketball-reference.com/
First let's take a peek at the players to win all four major NBA awards: Rookie of the Year first awarded 1953, All-Star MVP 1951, MVP 1956, Finals MVP 1969.
1970 Willis Reed (entered league 1965)
1972 Wilt Chamberlain (1960)
1984 Larry Bird (1980)
1991 Michael Jordan (1985)
2000 Shaquille O'Neal (1993)
2002 Tim Duncan (1998)
2012 LeBron James (2004)
2017 Kevin Durant (2008)
In every case but one the last award received was the Finals MVP (Duncan already had Finals MVP and All-Star MVP before he won his first regular season MVP in 2002).
It's remarkable to me how (relatively) early in their careers each player managed the quadfecta - aside from Wilt no player got the last award they needed beyond year ten, and he almost certainly would have gotten his first Finals MVP in 1967 if they had been awarded then.
It's also remarkable how regularly spaced the players are by draft class. Aside from the interregnum between Wilt and Bird the gaps are 5, 5, 8, 5, 6, 4 years. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was even drafted five years after Reed but somehow never won an All-Star MVP, so after him is the real dark days for ROYs. Of the ten players in between (there was a tie in 1971) only two won any other awards at all: one MVP for Bob McAdoo and one MVP/AMVP each for Dave Cowens.
Speaking of dark days, ROYs since Kevin Durant! Obviously there's still time for this to change but ten players in we have one MVP who seems unlikely to ever add any other hardware (Derrick Rose) and one All-Star MVP who apparently can't stand being on good teams (Kyrie Irving), then a whooooole lotta guys who have about as much shot at an NBA award as you, dear reader (Tyreke Evans, Michael Carter-Williams, Andrew Wiggins).
.
Okay! So doing the double.
We'll start with ROY winning another award in the same year because that's super rare and will probably never happen again. Elgin Baylor, Wilt Chamberlain, and Oscar Robertson won ROY and All-Star MVP the same year three years in a row and it hasn't happened since. Wilt also won the MVP, a feat Wes Unseld repeated in 1969 and hasn't happened since.
MVP and Finals MVP is the most common, but not uniformly so. It was extremely common from 1983 (Moses Malone) to 2003 (Tim Duncan), where fully 11 of the 21 years had the double - one for Magic Hakeem and Shaq, two for Bird, four for Jordan. Outside of that span we've only seen it 4 out of 29 possible years, and incredibly in two sets of back to back years: Willis Reed 1970 Kareem Abdul-Jabbar 1971, LeBron James 2012 LeBron James 2013.
MVP and All-Star MVP is relatively common at 14 total cases but hasn't happened since Allen Iverson's 2001 campaign. This is surprising since two of the top All-Star MVP getters of all time played in that span, but Kobe Bryant played two seconds of the 2008 All-Star Game (AMVP went to LeBron) and the only time LeBron won an All-Star Game in an MVP season was 2010, when Dwyane Wade won AMVP.
Finals MVP and All-Star MVP has only happened five times, and four of those have been grown man triples that also included regular season MVP: 1970 Willis Reed, 1996 Michael Jordan, 1998 Michael Jordan, 2000 Shaquille O'Neal. Kobe Bryant managed the double in 2009 but LeBron James had the best individual regular season of all time, leading has-beens and never-will-bes like Wally Szczerbiak and Boobie Gibson to 66 wins and emphatically securing his first MVP with a 97% share.
h/t www.basketball-reference.com/
First let's take a peek at the players to win all four major NBA awards: Rookie of the Year first awarded 1953, All-Star MVP 1951, MVP 1956, Finals MVP 1969.
1970 Willis Reed (entered league 1965)
1972 Wilt Chamberlain (1960)
1984 Larry Bird (1980)
1991 Michael Jordan (1985)
2000 Shaquille O'Neal (1993)
2002 Tim Duncan (1998)
2012 LeBron James (2004)
2017 Kevin Durant (2008)
In every case but one the last award received was the Finals MVP (Duncan already had Finals MVP and All-Star MVP before he won his first regular season MVP in 2002).
It's remarkable to me how (relatively) early in their careers each player managed the quadfecta - aside from Wilt no player got the last award they needed beyond year ten, and he almost certainly would have gotten his first Finals MVP in 1967 if they had been awarded then.
It's also remarkable how regularly spaced the players are by draft class. Aside from the interregnum between Wilt and Bird the gaps are 5, 5, 8, 5, 6, 4 years. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was even drafted five years after Reed but somehow never won an All-Star MVP, so after him is the real dark days for ROYs. Of the ten players in between (there was a tie in 1971) only two won any other awards at all: one MVP for Bob McAdoo and one MVP/AMVP each for Dave Cowens.
Speaking of dark days, ROYs since Kevin Durant! Obviously there's still time for this to change but ten players in we have one MVP who seems unlikely to ever add any other hardware (Derrick Rose) and one All-Star MVP who apparently can't stand being on good teams (Kyrie Irving), then a whooooole lotta guys who have about as much shot at an NBA award as you, dear reader (Tyreke Evans, Michael Carter-Williams, Andrew Wiggins).
.
Okay! So doing the double.
We'll start with ROY winning another award in the same year because that's super rare and will probably never happen again. Elgin Baylor, Wilt Chamberlain, and Oscar Robertson won ROY and All-Star MVP the same year three years in a row and it hasn't happened since. Wilt also won the MVP, a feat Wes Unseld repeated in 1969 and hasn't happened since.
MVP and Finals MVP is the most common, but not uniformly so. It was extremely common from 1983 (Moses Malone) to 2003 (Tim Duncan), where fully 11 of the 21 years had the double - one for Magic Hakeem and Shaq, two for Bird, four for Jordan. Outside of that span we've only seen it 4 out of 29 possible years, and incredibly in two sets of back to back years: Willis Reed 1970 Kareem Abdul-Jabbar 1971, LeBron James 2012 LeBron James 2013.
MVP and All-Star MVP is relatively common at 14 total cases but hasn't happened since Allen Iverson's 2001 campaign. This is surprising since two of the top All-Star MVP getters of all time played in that span, but Kobe Bryant played two seconds of the 2008 All-Star Game (AMVP went to LeBron) and the only time LeBron won an All-Star Game in an MVP season was 2010, when Dwyane Wade won AMVP.
Finals MVP and All-Star MVP has only happened five times, and four of those have been grown man triples that also included regular season MVP: 1970 Willis Reed, 1996 Michael Jordan, 1998 Michael Jordan, 2000 Shaquille O'Neal. Kobe Bryant managed the double in 2009 but LeBron James had the best individual regular season of all time, leading has-beens and never-will-bes like Wally Szczerbiak and Boobie Gibson to 66 wins and emphatically securing his first MVP with a 97% share.