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Editor' s note: It' s MVP Week at Bleacher Report, which means each da= y we' ll examine the NBA' s most prized award from a different lens. In par= t 1 on Monday, B/R looked at the most important factor placing Giannis Ante= tokounmpo and James Harden at the front of the MVP conversation. For most o= f this season, Giannis Antetokounmpo and James Harden have rightfully domin= ated the NBA' s MVP conversation. Giannis is putting up a raw stat line tha= t looks like prime Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Harden is scoring at a level we hav= en' t seen since Michael Jordan averaged 37.1 points in 1986-87. How do we = know that? Well, first we need to know roughly what " MVP level" = is. At the risk of never getting out of the weeds we' re about to dive into= , let' s explore those two words. Step 1: We need a list of every league MV= P since 1974. Thanks, Basketball Reference. And why since 1974? That' s whe= n the league started tracking steals and blocks. It' s also when Basketball= Reference starts tracking box plus-minus (" a box score estimate of t= he points per 100 possessions that a player contributed above a league-aver= age player, translated to an average team," according to the site) and= per-possession stats. Step 2: We need to know the average pace (estimate o= f the number of possessions per game) over those 45 MVP seasons. And that' = s pretty tedious, but it was necessary to look all of them up individually = so we could account for this season' s uptick. Believe it or not, this seas= on' s league-average pace of 100 possessions per game isn' t a whole lot hi= gher than the 96.5 from the average MVP season. Step 3: Figure out how many= of those 96.5 possessions were actually played by the MVPs themselves. All= 45 played an average of 38.1 minutes per game. That' s 79.4 percent of the= game. And 79.4 percent of 96.5 possessions is 76.6 possessions. Voila. Ste= p 4: Now, we can compare the average MVP' s numbers per 76.6 possessions to= a handful of players today per 76.6 possessions. That puts everyone on a m= ore level playing field. Step 5: And speaking of level playing fields, we n= eed to find the league-average true shooting percentage from 1974 to 2018. = But, as you may have noticed, individual numbers are up all over the league= And this season alone, there are 15 players (and arguably even more) who = are playing at what we used to know as an MVP level. =20

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