Ranking the 8 NBA Cup MVP candidates to win with the semifinals approaching

Now that we know which four teams have advanced to the semifinals in Las Vegas, it is a lot easier to predict who will win MVP of the NBA Cup.

Last year, LeBron James took home the inaugural award but will not have a chance to defend his crown this time. The winner this year will come from either the Thunder, Rockets, Bucks, or Hawks. There are still a few games left, but past success in the previous games matters as well.

According to NBA.com, the award will be given “based on the players’ performance in both Group Play and the Knockout Rounds.” Meanwhile, even for those who do not win NBA Cup MVP, the league will also award All-Tournament honors.

To add color about how everyone has fared thus far, we wanted to provide some catch-all metrics that contextualized player performance during group play and knockout rounds. All stats refer to those games only and not all other regular season games.

As we mentioned before last season, we asked a basketball data scientist who works for an NBA team to tell us which was the best statistic using just box-score data. This individual recommended that we use Daily RAPM Estimate (DRE) by Kevin Ferrigan.

You can learn more about the metric via Nylon Calculus. But what you need to know is that is that it is a bit like Player Efficiency Rating (PER) with weights derived from RAPM (which you can learn more about here) instead of more arbitrary weights.

Meanwhile, we have also added how everyone has fared in HoopsHype’s Global Rating during the NBA Cup as well. For a detailed breakdown of this statistic, click here. Listed additionally is percentile ranking for Player Impact Estimate (PIE) provided by NBA.com, but with our minute regression added.

Overall, for each player, we included percentile rankings from seeding games and knockout rounds in regressed DRE per 48 minutes as well as Global Rating and PIE. Attached to each player as well are their current betting odds, provided via BetMGM.

Here is how we would give out the awards based on what we have seen so far an we can expect moving forward.