Team Records when MVP candidates play (OnWins and WOWY)

As discussed on a recent episode of the Thinking Basketball podcast, there’s been a lot of talk about the importance of “winning” when it comes to MVP voting (and even All-NBA) this season. With the regular season behind us, for posterity, I’ve compiled the team records for every candidate in games said candidate has appeared in.

Additionally I’ve added a column called “OnWins,” which is the record for each player based on his individual plus-minus in a game. (Shoutout to realgm’s Doctor MJ for creating this.) In other words, if the player finished with a positive plus-minus in the game, he is credited for a “win” individually, because his team won his minutes for that game. Here are the 13 candidates from the latest ESPN straw poll:

Player	In Wins	In Losses	Win% Pace in lineup	Win% Pace Out line	Win% change	OnWins	OnLosses	OnWin %
Devin Booker	56	12	68	47	21	49	19	72.1%
Chris Paul	53	12	67	53	14	45	19	69.2%
Jayson Tatum	49	27	53	27	26	54	22	71.1%
Nikola Jokic	46	28	51	21	30	50	20	67.6%
Giannis Antetokounmpo	45	22	55	33	22	44	23	65.7%
Joel Embiid	45	23	53	35	18	45	22	66.2%
Steph Curry	45	19	58	36	22	44	18	68.8%
Luka Doncic	44	21	56	39	17	38	27	58.5%
DeMar DeRozan	43	33	46	41	5	43	32	56.6%
Trae Young	40	36	43	41	2	42	33	55.3%
Ja Morant	36	21	52	62	-10	35	21	61.4%
Kevin Durant	36	19	54	24	30	36	17	65.5%
LeBron James	25	31	37	25	12	24	30	42.9%

Disclaimer: Again, I’m posting this for people who like to reference “team success” for individual awards. This should not be an end-point in individual player analysis if you are trying to determine how much impact or value a player has. In order to do that with this data, you should also try to account for teammates who are in or out of lineups, opponent quality, role, and so on, to say nothing of using on/off, adjusted plus-minus data, or hybrid metrics that combine this with box score factors in order to help determine impact, value, and/or winning. /disclaimer

Finally, I should note that the leader in Wins and OnWins this season was Mikal Bridges, with 64 wins and 62 OnWins, 17 OnLosses and 3 ties. Here’s the full podcast episode: