The 8 most likely Olympic men's basketball MVP candidates (LeBron James!), ranked
The men’s basketball tournament at the 2024 Paris Olympics is heading into its final phase and several players stand out as MVP candidates.
Considering that Team USA remains the heavy favorite to win gold, most of the leading contenders play for the United States. However, if they are upset, there are some other individuals who deserve serious consideration for their efforts thus far as well.
To put things in perspective, we gathered the latest odds and some advanced statistics to judge how everyone has played.
As we mentioned before last NBA 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 the shortened version is that it’s like Player Efficiency Rating (PER) but weights derived from RAPM (which you can learn more about here) instead of just arbitrary weights.
Attached to each player are their current odds via DraftKings as well as their overall ranking in regressed DRE per 40 minutes during the Olympics. We also included their ranking among all players thus far in HoopsHype’s Global Rating, which you can learn more about here.
All statistics are via fiba.basketball unless noted otherwise.