#Nba eastern conference finals 2022 series#
From 1958 on, though, every team has needed to win a best-of-seven semifinals series to reach the NBA Finals. I left some wiggle room for losing players to win MVP only if the series went seven games, they played excellent in their Game 7 defeat and the winning team didn’t have a player whose performance was as impressive.Īnd how far back can we award our retroactive MVPs? The first NBA postseason was in 1947, 3 but from 1947 through 1957, the path to the NBA Finals was inconsistent in terms of formatting. This means the best player on the Knicks in that series (Willis Reed) was my winner. 2 Kareem Abdul-Jabbar may have dominated the 1970 Eastern Division finals statistically, but his Bucks lost to the Knicks in five games. While average Game Score told me who had the best series, I also wanted to be realistic: Series MVPs are almost always awarded to a player on the winning team.
#Nba eastern conference finals 2022 full#
Across a series, an average Game Score north of 20 is very good and 25 is great, while over 30 for a full series is nearly unheard of.
One important thing to note about Game Score is that a score of 10 is indicative of an average, run-of-the-mill game, while 40 is legendary. After some experimentation, John Hollinger’s Game Score seemed like the best fit in terms of matching voter intuition (by rewarding players who dominate the box score) and availability (it can be applied to any complete box score since player turnovers were first tracked in 1977-78 and can still provide useful direction when some less essential statistics are missing). To award retroactive conference finals MVPs, I first needed to settle on a consistent metric. Yet the first question that popped into my mind when the league announced the awards was: “If the NBA had been awarding this honor all along, would Magic and Bird have racked up the most of the trophies now named for them?” Thankfully, 1 has cumulative box scores (and individual game boxes) for every playoff series in NBA history, so I set out to answer my own question. Bird and Johnson are fitting namesakes for these awards given that their struggle for supremacy from opposite coasts is often credited with reviving the NBA in the 1980s.
When the NBA conference finals each wrap up, the league will award two new trophies: the Larry Bird Trophy for the Eastern Conference finals MVP and the Earvin “Magic” Johnson Trophy for the Western Conference finals MVP. PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY EMILY SCHERER / NBA
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