Because I feel it’s very obvious that some players are extremely valuable even if their team stinks. I suppose there’s this fallacy that you can’t be adding much to a team if they have little success, and I used to believe that myself, but I’ve realized that sometimes teams are so bad that the best player in the league can do little with it. Kevin Garnett is the same guy he was in Minnesota when he was on some terrible teams, and if he hadn’t been on those teams, they might have struggled to win 5 games. Putting more talent doesn’t make him more valuable-in fact you can argue it makes him less valuable.

I’m not going to argue every player here, but let me attempt to argue the point at large. If you really think that JJ is more valuable because his team has won more games, then why have the MVP voting at all? Just give it to the guy who scores the most points on the team that wins the most games right? His team is the best, so he must be the MVP.

Funny, I actually hear this argument quite often. The MVP has to be the best player on the best team (last year, many argued for Kobe instead of Chris Paul because Kobe was on a better team)l. This is a classic example of circular logic. Yet it’s a pitiable argument when you actually beg the question

Why is Kobe Bryant the most valuable player?
Because he plays on the best team
Why are the Lakers the best team?
Because Kobe Bryant is the MVP.

You simply cannot focus entire on a team’s performance to make conclusions about any one player on that team.

That’s using one unsound premise to defend another unsound premise. One player alone is not responsible for his team’s record. You could throw me out there with Kobe, Lebron, Duncan, and Howard for 38 minutes and we’d win some games. But if you substitute Mario West for me, that team probably wins 65+ games. Just because my team had 50 wins doesn’t mean I’m a better point guard than Jose Calderon.

While it’s hard to isolate a player from his team’s performance, you need to make some kind of effort to do so. You’d be interested to learn, I imagine, that Brandon Roy is assisted on only 30% of his made field goals while Joe is assisted on 44%. And this is despite an offensive concept that relies extremely heavily on Joe beating everyone in order to get a shot up. Combine this with the fact that Brandon Roy makes a higher percentage of his shots than Joe and has a lower turnover percentage, and you being to see how he might be more valuable than Joe Johnson.