Oscar Robertson is the only player in NBA history to average a triple-double over the course of a season, that coming 55 years ago, and now, all of a sudden, we may have two players do it in the same year.
Is this real life? Is this actually a possibility? Does the NBA have the best storylines of any sport in our current day?
Yes is the answer to all three of these questions, and at least with the first two queries, there shouldn't be a ton of raised eyebrows as to why this is the case in this specific year.
Consider Russell Westbrook and James Harden, the two players giving The Big O a serious challenge for triple-double immortality, and their narratives entering the season.
For Russ, Kevin Durant, long-considered a top-three player in the world and the Oklahoma City Thunder's heart and soul, departs for Golden State, leaving a man that has struggled to emerge from Durant's shadow the past eight years with a massive chip on his shoulder and the ability to spread his wings without regard for another superstar clad in the same jersey for the very first time.
For James, a former Durant and Westbrook teammate himself, the deadweight was gone, as Dwight Howard opted out of his contract in Houston, signed another big one with Atlanta, and brought to a close a strange and unsuccessful three-year stint alongside The Beard.
Two beasts, freed from their shackles, the basketball world their oyster.
So it's no wonder we sit here, halfway through the NBA season, with a two-horse race for MVP. For the longest time, yours truly entertained the idea that OKC and Houston may not make the playoffs, specifically early on when the Thunder started 8-8 and the Rockets weren't scoring 120-plus seemingly every night. The thought was that should one, or both, of these teams falter and finish towards the bottom of the playoffs, or out all together, the door would be ajar for others (Anthony Davis: second in the league in scoring, fifth in rebounding, leading in blocks) to jump into contention for the sport's highest honor. But we can sit here now, Houston having lost just four games since November and OKC resting eight games clear of the playoff cut line and just one game out of their division lead, with clarity and as close to confirmation as you can get at this point in the year.
Since this is how the first half has played out, the only question that needs to be asked now is; which one of the two horses comes away with the honor, and why?
Some say Westbrook, some say Harden, some flip the two week-by-week and still talk about LeBron, but if the season were to end today, here are the facts:
- Russ would finish the year averaging a triple-double, putting up 30.9 PPG (league leader), 10.5 APG (2nd in league), and 10.7 RPG (11th in league, only guard in the top 20). OKC would make the playoffs despite having lost the 2014 MVP and one of the marquee players on this planet in the offseason, and they would also do so without any player besides Westbrook finishing in the top-40 in the league in Real Plus-Minus Wins (RPM Wins), an ESPN sabermetric-type stat designed to calculate a player's value in wins to his team, semi-similar to Wins Above Replacement (WAR) in baseball.
- Harden would finish the year third in the league in scoring with 28.4 PPG, as the league leader in assists at 11.7 per game, and 22nd in the league in rebounding at 8.2 per game. His team would finish third in the west, having won nearly three times as many games as they lost, and would accomplish this without Dwight Howard, who had statistically his worst season since his rookie year in 2015-16, but can still be a force in the paint when utilized. Harden is joined in the top-40 in the league in RPM Wins by teammates Trevor Ariza, Ryan Anderson, and Eric Gordon.
Look at those rundowns, and Russ looks to have the advantage, right?
OK, the wording may have been a bit more kind to one side of the coin, and if things were framed slightly differently in each of those short bios of these players and their team's seasons this year, maybe you would be swayed a different way. Regardless, the point being made is that Westbrook is currently hitting the "untouchable" milestone this whole debate revolves around, and is doing so having lost more than Harden did this offseason and with less surrounding him this regular season than Harden has in Houston.
But no matter how you word the two player summaries, who you think was more beneficial to their team between Durant and Howard, or who is left surrounding our two MVP candidates, it seems clear that one of these two things would need to happen for Harden to wrestle the MVP from Westbrook's hands:
- Harden starts grabbing boards at a much higher rate and gets a season-long triple-double.
- Russ slows down and falls below a triple-double for the campaign.
Since we've operated under the assumption that both these teams will make the playoffs, the only other thing that could change this MVP outlook, we see no other way.
Let's take another rare feat as an example. Baseball's Triple Crown, long thought of as one of the most herculean achievement in sport, is earned when a player leads their league in batting average, home runs, and runs batted in. Of the three in baseball to accomplish that since Oscar Robertson put up his season-long triple-double (showing the triple-double as a much more rare feat), each of them has won the MVP (Miguel Cabrera, Carl Yastrzemski, and Frank Robinson). How could you possibly vote against it in baseball? You couldn't. It would be like voting for a horse other than American Pharoah, the winner of the Triple Crown in horse racing in 2015, a feat not accomplished the prior 37 years, for horse of the year that season.
So if you can't do it in baseball or horse racing for the Triple Crown, how could you possibly vote against the person that will pull off basketball's triple this year? You can't, because the athlete to see heights this rare, something that only comes along once every 55 years, less often than some of sports most historic and noteworthy feats, deserves the Most Valuable Player award, no matter how you define it.
Right now, that honor goes to Westbrook, but what if they BOTH average a triple-double???
Well...let's just cross that bridge if we come to it.