#this is more about the bigger problem that spg has been having for a while

[storyofexistence]

Growth in pain

                                             One of the most painful moments of my life happened 11 years ago. I lost my father when I am only 8 years old. It turned my world upside down. I wasn’t ready to lose him and I think I will never be. He promised me that he will never leave me. And now that he is gone, he left me hanging on those promises.  A lot of things changed since then. Including having a complete and happy family. My mom tried to be in a relationship again. I was a huge papa’s girl that’s why it is hard for me to see her with another man. But I love her that’s why I never say things to her even if it kills me inside. Christmas day since then became a reminder of his death for me. Because it was December 10 when he died, 15 days before Christmas. I remember my mom used to deduct my money because I don’t do the assigned chores for me.  My papa always picks my side, the scenario was always me crying in the stock room and he will go to me and hand me money and tell me to be responsible the next time. I had to graduate grade school and high school without him. Before, my dream was to have a tremendous debut; But when I lose my papa all I want is for him to be there on that special day. Losing is also gaining lessons. I may lose my papa at a young age but it made me do things that “only men” can do as a society say. It made me the feminist I am today. Grow up not depending my life on any man.

                                         Losing friends is normal. I had these people in my life that I met when I was in grade school. When we were in 5th grade I run for president of SPG. They are on my team, on the day of the election I found out that they voted for the other candidate. I feel betrayed; I realized they are not the ones I can count on. I never get mad at them but the feeling of betrayal was always there even how happy I am hanging out with them. From that, I tried to please everyone I met. Because for me if I am the best everyone will be wanting to be friends with me. I moved to high school and gain new people in my life. I’ve been into a lot of circles of friends. All of it failed, and it made me think if I was the one who has the problem or if life is just like that. Those people I met kept on promising me that they’ll be there for me always, but when life gets dark and sad they disappear.  When I am in junior high I have a circle of friends that made me experience things and made my whole junior life more exciting. That experience is not only about good things but it was worth it. But suddenly we have to part ways. I stay in that school and continue my senior year. While they go to different schools. But I got stuck to that world that I am with them. And then senior year come and as usual, I met other people but they made me feel excluded in their life. But I learned that you don’t have to pretend around the people that truly value and love you. Keep your circle small. Don’t be afraid to cut off ties with people who don’t give you peace. It is all about quality over quantity.

                                           Love can give you butterflies in your stomach and heart pain the next day.  Life will give you someone that will give you either love or pain. In my case, it is a mix of both. I met him when we were in 8th grade. But we never get into a relationship. We enjoy the company of each other. I wasn’t ready for commitment at that time. We stayed on that kind of connection. No commitment no worries we just enjoy our time together. But when the time I was ready to commit to him he had already gotten tired of waiting. He leaves me without any explanation. I keep seeking answers. Aside from papa he used to be the one I run to when life gets too much. That time that he is the reason for my tears I don’t know what to do. Seeing him as if nothing happened broke me so much. But maybe the love is bigger than everything that happened. I still can’t get mad at him for ruining my peace. It has gotten to the point that I beg him to come back and choose me. But as time pass I realize that what we have is not worth keeping. Because he made me beg for the bare minimum. Made me feel that I don’t have the right to ask for his time. Keep on giving me mixed signals. And never clear his intention. I never saw all of these things before.  I always believe that what we have is a big wrong timing. But I learn one important thing from this experience. It is that you never meet the right person at the wrong time because the right people are timeless.

                                               Failure has always been part of success as they say. But it will cause you so much pain. Not passing your dream college course is one of them. Ever since I was in 5th grade becoming Civil Engineer has been my greatest dream. When I was in high school I am looking forward to college but astoundingly life is not like I think it is. I applied for my preferred course which is civil engineering. But sadly I didn’t get the slot for the program. I cried heavily as I read the email. I’m not even worried if my family will know that I am crying. It made me doubt myself. I still had to enroll even though I don’t want the course. It was double tiring because the course itself is hard and not wanting the course at the same time. But when my favorite Doctor once said “There are times a decision will come first before passion” she is right.

                                               Love will cause you pain. Pain will lead you to growth. It’s a never-ending cycle. All of the struggles, failures, and pain will teach you things that books can’t. I often heard them say “hindi pedeng walang sakit”. When I was a kid I never understood them. I think it is unfair that we don’t have a choice. But as life made me experience things that turn my world upside down and made me lose myself. I started to realize that they are right, life is full of pain that we can’t control.  But we always have the choice to move forward. We don’t need to force ourselves to move on from the pain but continuing is important. Don’t allow yourself to be stuck in the storm and let the rain soak you. Put on an umbrella and watch how the rain poured from the sky.   I’ll be honest not all of the pain is worth it, but the lessons are.

[skillwiththequill]

I’m gonna word vomit my feelings about the new episode of supergirl. Spoilers, obviously

okay, so, that episode

I’m just going to completely gloss over everything that wasn’t sanvers, because who cares about the stuff that wasn’t sanvers (also don’t want to invite in Discourse)

but like

they talked

and it was so good and healthy and I am SO HAPPY that Alex figured out that Maggie was hiding/repressing stuff because trust issues and holy crud I wanna watch that scene another 30 times I maybe just found it on youtube and took a break from writing this to watch it twice

Also, the whole I always thought you were perfect but it’s really nice to see that you have problems too like I feel that on a spiritual level y’all I can’t I love her and her and them alkjdsgfasjkl

this was such a good thing that happened

now we are going to move on to the problem.

Like I love them, but seriously? Seriously? One peck on the lips for the whole episode? Sure, there is a lot of cutesy arm-in-arm stuff, and there is cute banter, and tight embraces, but for the first half of the episode I was watching with my mother behind me and in view of my laptop screen and I really doubt she would even have picked up on the fact that they are in a relationship. 

I just

augh

@ supergirl team please please please let maggie and and alex be a NORMAL COUPLE who do NORMAL COUPLE THINGS like kiss each other

I mean

like

I appreciate when being gay isn’t hypersexualized, because gay relationships are relationships and they are about a lot more than sex, and I feel like people don’t get that a lot, and that idea is I think a big reason why people think all gay content is unsuitable for children. I appreciate that they aren’t doing that

but they are waaaaaaay overcorrecting. you don’t need to neuter gay people to make them appropriate for television, y’all. It doesn’t have to be all linked arms and effing nose kisses and whatever cutesy crap that y’all come up with. They are allowed to freaking make out.

anyway. No one has actually read this, which is cool and stuff. I feel like I’m shouting into the void a lot on this site lately. Thanks to anyone who made it this far.

[cellerityweb]

World of Tanks – Rebuilding Trust

For developers to know what players want means for them to listen to what players have to say. Regaining the community’s trust was an important step in World of Tanks success story and here’s how that went.

For World of Tanks devs, 2016 began with redefining how they handle game development. If they had a boxed game, they would have taken a break to rethink their approach – but it wasn’t an option with an online project like World of Tanks. A little over four months and several small updates after Rubicon, the team made a literally loud comeback with 9.14, delivering on the promise of more realistic vehicle movement physics and taking the experience up a notch with deep and immersive new sound. No longer fixated on releasing an update every other month, they went on to address a few more issues that tankers were vocal about, while working on fundamental problems like SPGs and matchmaker on the newly-launched Sandbox server. Deeper under the hood, Wargaming was going through a massive transition, triggered by Rubicon and touching on every aspect of their operations, both internal and player-facing. The change began with the creation of a Product Group, a small team of executives who now decide where World of Tanks is heading.

We’re handing it over to the two of them, Thaine Lyman and Milos Jerabek, to talk about the lessons learnt from Rubicon and the transformation the team went through.

Nimble Decision-Making

As a company gets bigger, it’s easy for the soul of it to change a bit. For me, the greatest thing about Wargaming is that, although it scaled from 100 to over 4,000 people in several years, it managed to keep its soul intact. The »young, scrappy, and hungry« start-up spirit, which you’d usually attribute to smaller studios, is still here. No matter the differences people have, positions they hold or languages they speak, they’re all gamers, driven by a love of games and desire to create experiences other gamers could rally around. They bring their talent and their passion to work every day.

However, the fast growth the company went through, had its consequences. The ability for finding quick solutions was lost as the number of parties involved in decision-making grew and the sole connection between parties became scarce. We ended up with too many people who could block a decision by saying »no« to it and the near absence of dialogue between devs, marketing and publishing teams across offices. So when Rubicon happened, it didn’t come out of nowhere: it was the direct result of problems that had been brewing for quite some time. We actually passed that point of no return and realized we needed to rethink the way we operate.

From left to right: Thaine Lyman (WoT Product Director), Paul Barnett (WoT Deputy Creative Director, Exploitation Research), Harkonnen (blogger), AgingJedi (YouTuber), Quickybaby (YouTuber/Streamer). More than 40 so-called Community Contributors and devs were coming together at Tankfest 2017 to exchange thoughts, feedback and ideas.

A lot needed to be done in a short time and quickly, so we started from the top by organizing a Product Group. Basically, we brought together World of Tanks »founding fathers« forming a steering committee with key people from development and publishing and lead by CEO. It’s also when Slava Makarov who then headed the R&D division returned as Creative Director for World of Tanks. The group was to make numerous important decisions, cut through red tape and different points of view, get a plan on paper and implement it. This worked out pretty well and it unblocked us, so we could get moving again.

This larger group that was operating with direct involvement from our CEO had its moment in time. Without it, we wouldn’t have overcome the huge initial roadblocks. However, once we were past the crisis and moving to day-to-day operational activities, involvement from so many parties was no longer needed. We created an efficient decision body but getting it into one room was a tricky task. Imagine how hard it was to get 12 extremely busy people (most of them executives) to meet! To stop the Product Group from becoming one of the bottlenecks it was designed to fight, we went on to a more nimble structure.

We scaled it back and went to the four-person group we have today (Product Director, Publishing Director, Creative Director, Marketing Director and Development Director). It enabled faster, more agile decision-making and made us personally accountable for our actions. If it’s just five people, it’s these five who are either doing it well or messing it up. It’s all on this group. They make decisions, they deal with consequences. Of course, it can be hard to get even five people together. It’s not an issue with five people fully dedicated to a project and whose lives revolve around it. Even if they are in different places and time zones, they can generally get things resolved quickly.

One Game, One Team

Artiom and Thaine answering questions from the community during a live-stream at Wargaming Fest.

I (Milos) joined the team shortly after Rubicon; found myself in the eye of the storm so to speak – but I was happy. I’ve been playing World of Tanks since its Closed Beta in 2010 and experienced Rubicon as a player. Like the rest of the community, I couldn’t shake off the feeling that Wargaming wasn’t listening and being a member of the team now, I was actually able to be a part to change it.

If you look at it from a player perspective, whether you are spending a few hours in random battles, discussing the game on forums, or duking it out on the Global Map, it’s all World of Tanks to you. Should you stumble upon a feature that isn’t working the way it’s supposed to and get no response from the devs when you bring up on the forum, will you bother figuring out which department, office or team let you down? Of course not. If there’s a fault somewhere, it’s the game that is faulty and the entire team takes the blame. It’s best worded in the »One game, one team« motto we live by now, and this approach goes far beyond establishing a closer bond with departments outside development.

Slava Makarov (WoT Product Director) and Anton Pankov (WoT Publishing Director) during the Grand Finals live-stream.

When I joined, the expertise was spread all around the development unit. Another issue rooted in Wargaming’s fast growth led to a problematic situation: team leads weren’t managing specialists with the same expertise, so ideas and experience sometimes were not in line with everyone involved. Unfortunately, we had a structure that was working this way. Speaking to designers one day, I was amazed to discover they barely sync with each other. They were sitting on the other floor and would only meet for weekly dev sync-ups to discuss what’s going on. It’s impossible to preserve and spread expertise with a structure like that in place. If you want it to work, it needs to be programmers with programmers, managers with managers, and designers with designers.

We reshuffled the organizational structure, building it around expertise and areas of talent and putting experts in the field ahead of teams. To pull it off, we had to restart the team. There were multiple ways to do this. Choosing between a step-by-step approach and a one-time change, we went with the second. Actually, we didn’t have much choice. We had to move on with the game and couldn’t allow ourselves to take a break. It’s a bit easier with boxed games where you can stop for a month with no harm to the product. Online MMOs are a different story. You can’t go to players and say »Guys, we’ve got some internal issues to deal with so we’re taking a sabbatical. No patches for the next half a year.« With an online game like World of Tanks, we’re constantly aiming at a moving target. It’s not just chasing the train. You’re chasing it in several cars, each driving in an opposite direction and all has been done to make our game better for our players.

Dialogue with Players

The player community had lots of questions in the months after Rubicon but we couldn’t answer them instantly. Our message wasn’t unified across regions. So before making any big steps in terms of development we had to fix both the tone and the content of our communication with players. We had to share the same messages with players, whichever language they speak and have a sound strategy as to what we’re saying, how we’re wording it and how much context we provide.

Only a year ago, all World of Tanks announcements, news etc. were first written in Russian, then translated into English. One day we sat down and looked at the Russian and English articles covering the same topic only to discover they didn’t convey the same meaning. Feeding players just with positive moments would not be honest towards our players and we wouldn’t cover difficulties and problems we’re facing along the way in just as much detail. The first step to fixing it was admitting the game’s fundamental problems.

The very way we shared news had to change. We went from informing the community in pretty much a declarative manner with little to no explanation to providing the reasoning behind the decisions we make and breaking these reasons and/or changes down in detail, so that players could see our train of thought. If you’re playing World of Tanks, you don’t want to know what developers are doing; you learn it by playing the game. What you really need to know is why they’re doing it, just as you want to know the next steps. Not all problems can be fixed at once, and knowing an action plan lets you see things in perspective.

Considering how big some problems were, we openly admitted it would take time and kept the community in the loop as we worked on solutions.

Success for us really comes from player feedback. If we’re doing well, the players let us know. If there’s room for improvement, they’ll tell us loud and clear. It’s only in collaboration with them that we could further evolve the project. Every new milestone we reach, we reach it through contributions from both the community and the development team.

Evolving the game together with players is not a marketing stance slapped on as an afterthought. It’s becoming a part of our DNA. We’ve gone from informing and imposing our own opinion and decisions to listening, explaining choices and letting everyone know what’s going on. We now actively encourage players to speak up, provide their input and act upon their suggestions when introducing new features and improving the game. We’re just getting started and have the guts to admit there’s a lot of room for improvement in our communication. For example, we’ve been doing regular livestreams with developers and meeting with community contributors to ensure we’re all on the same page on features and future developments. However, we didn’t pay as much attention to their concerns on balance tweaks to vehicles. We’re going to streamline our dialogue on these in the coming months.

Mentality Shift

At one point, basically anyone in the development team could say »No, it’s a bad idea.« And then whatever the team was working on was suddenly thrown into chaos. There was no long-term plan, no clear list of priorities that were aligned between Minsk development, the exec team in Cyprus and the publishing offices across the world.

A lot of the work went into defining the game’s biggest holes and problems; what we should be doing, when and why. No one knows the game better than the people who created it. So we started by getting the devs’ input around what they felt could benefit the game from a technical standpoint, art standpoint, creative direction and so on. The next step was finding a nice balance between the devs’ ideas on addressing critical issues and cool and interesting new features.

Take matchmaker or arty, for example. They’ve been the biggest sources of player frustration for years. Every new patch would come out and even if it had cool new features, the first feedback was »It doesn’t fix matchmaker.« or »What’s with arty? When are you gonna get it right?«

“We needed to fix the holes in the boat and it’s not like the dev team didn’t know about these fundamental problems or wasn’t capable. In reality, there was a lot of disagreement around what fixing them should involve.”

The team (development, marketing, publishing offices, HQ … everyone!) knew there were serious problems but they were terrified of the impact the changes might have. To help them overcome it, we had to make them see that, first of all, changes were needed; second of all, we were never going to get a 100% positive reaction to some of them but what was happening then was even worse – we’re boring our players by not making any changes! Anything’s better than that. Slava Makarov and Andrey Biletskiy became the main driving force, pushing through ideas to create a strong holistic vision that allowed the team start moving in the right direction.

Proving Ground

Our players often joke Wargaming can never do anything on the first try and it’s completely fine. Is it possible to make everyone happy? Of course not! Take twenty people and you get twenty opinions. What we have to do is find a solution, which would click with as many out of these twenty as possible. The second equally crucial aspect here is reacting on feedback with quick fixes, which is virtually impossible if you’re introducing a massive change in a version.

Supertest (the first testing phase of a feature) happens roughly eight weeks before the version release. There’s little you can do in eight weeks. If an issue is small, you apply a few changes to fix it but it’s so small it’s not going to affect the overall experience. If something just isn’t working, you can remove it completely but there’s no way to fix it in eight weeks. Fixing the game’s core with that workflow was an impossible mission and that’s when the Sandbox server came about.

It was a completely new idea for the company: a proving ground where we could test fundamental features months (if not years) ahead of their release, together with people who’re actually playing the game rather than just our QA team. Testing a fresh-baked feature internally is one thing. People who’re directly involved in development view it all from what you would call an insider’s perspective. When we bring in players, we see a much bigger picture.

Getting feedback from people we’ve never played with, allows us to look into their preferences and get to the bottom of things, discovering issues that we’ve never viewed as problematic.

Sandbox also attracts players of different cultural backgrounds and with different levels of skill. We aren’t limited to testing what’s nearly finished: we share with them an idea, find out where they stand on it and bury it or keep working on it, depending on their feedback. Another important thing here is that we’re being completely honest about what we’re doing every step of the way.

We learnt a lot along the way. Take a look at the 1st iteration of Sandbox. It was way too slow and over-packed with stuff. We didn’t have a solid roadmap with the next steps. Finally, we didn’t communicate what we were doing properly. Instead of explaining why and how a new system of vehicle roles was going to improve the experience, we focused solely on what we were doing. For the 2nd iteration, the Sandbox server had its own blog, where the dev team briefs players on every new batch of features they roll out, providing the rationale behind tweaks and explaining the hypothesis they’re looking to test with them.

When conducting a postmortem for the 1st iteration of Sandbox, we analyzed it from two perspectives: gameplay and the way we presented it to players. The idea we tested was interesting but it didn’t click. We tried something that looked perfect on paper thinking »OK, it’s got legs, it makes sense, let’s go for it.« Had we done it in a version, it would have been Rubicon 2.0. We were wiser this time, so we did it in Sandbox. We tried it on a limited number of vehicles and, without actually rebalancing the entire game, saw that players didn’t want it; so went back to the drawing board.

The 1st iteration was an eye-opening experience in many ways. We realized players didn’t see a problem where we thought it was: in vehicle roles, which we considered obsolete. So we didn’t just go and devise a new solution. We went back to the very beginning, rethinking what the game’s key problems were, to formulate what we now call the »unholy trinity«: matchmaking, arty and maps. Once the groundwork was in place, we could start working towards fixing these, putting big teams to work.

About the Author:

Milos Jerabek is World of Tanks Development Director at Wargaming

Before joining Wargaming, Milos spent four years at Remedy Entertainment where he started as a level designer and climbed the ranks to become Production Director. As a Development Director, he coordinates communication between teams within the Development Department and ensures they work together to deliver high-quality gameplay experience to players.

    Thaine Lyman

is World of Tanks Product Director

Thaine joined Wargaming in 2015. Before that, he spent over 10 years at Activision where he worked as Executive Producer for the »Call of Duty« series and as VP of Production. In his current role, he works with the executive team, development and publishing teams, regional GMs, and operational teams to ensure World of Tanks provides a best-in-class experience.

    The post World of Tanks – Rebuilding Trust appeared first on Making Games.

World of Tanks – Rebuilding Trust published first on https://thetruthspypage.tumblr.com/

[thebreakdown-blog]

The case for and against everyone’s MVP campaign

LeBron James - Cleveland Cavaliers - SF - 4x MVP

For:

Where else to start? Everyone already knows LeBron is the greatest player on the planet, even you Pop. Each and every year since his first MVP trophy, he has forced his name into the mouths of the public when discussing the current MVP. And he’s done it again. Many NBA experts have problems with not giving LeBron the MVP every year. Colin Cowherd would be a great example. Besides, he is the greatest player in the NBA. He consistently puts up staggering numbers effectively, plays great defense (sometimes), and he’ll win you some games. Oh, did I forget to mention he’ll most certainly take your team to the NBA Finals?; I guess that’s pretty important. LeBron increased his points per game average, and had career-highs in rebounds and points per game at the age of 32 - pretty unheard of. On top of this, in the 23 games LeBron hasn’t played in the last three years of the regular season, the Cavaliers’ win percentage barely hovers over 20 percent. A team that still has Kyrie Irving and Kevin Love. If that doesn’t scream MVP, then what does?

Against:

The MVP trophy has typically been given to players who had the best individual performance (with a successful team record), rather than the best basketball player in the game. Take the time that Karl Malone won MVP in ‘97 or Barkley in ‘93 back when NBA fans had the luxury of saying that Michael Jordan was still playing in the league. Based on that, both Harden and Westbrook put up bigger numbers than James. And if the Thunder’s record isn’t impressive enough then look at how far James Harden led his team. Additionally, LeBron had two other All-Stars on his team whereas everyone else on this list didn’t have any - resulting only in a 51-31 record in the lesser-talented Eastern Conference. That was eclipsed by 4 teams and was tied with another 3. Huh.

Numbers: 26.4 ppg 8.6 rpg 8.6 apg 1.2 spg 0.6 bpg on 54.8% FG and 36.3% 3PT FG

Kawhi Leonard - San Antonio Spurs - SF

For:

It is simply remarkable to see how much Kawhi has progressed in his time in the NBA. During his tenure so far, he has increased his points per game each year while slowly yet surely easing into the franchise player of the Spurs. Out of all the candidates, Kawhi put up the least amount of points, rebounds and assists this season. But as we have learnt with the Spurs, win > numbers. And it shows. Although Kawhi doesn’t always blow up the stat sheet, his team had the highest win percentage in the NBA excluding the four-All-Stars-in-one-team Warriors. Leonard’s profile is far from raised in San Antonio but he gets the job done in an effective manner shooting the ball at a high percentage. On the other end of the floor is where he is undeniably superior to everyone on this list. Kawhi is an elite defensive force in the NBA winning back-to-back DPOY honours. He’s the best two-way player with the best record on this list… MVP?

Against:

Kawhi has the worst numbers. We've seen this sport of numbers before and their coach is Popovich who has led a team to the playoffs since humans have existed. Kawhi may have cemented his spot as one of the best players in the league but his individual performance may not be enough to sway the voters regarding other candidates’ performance. On top of that, he has the same body and size of LeBron James and is still visibly inferior as a player, as is everyone I guess.

Numbers: 25.5 ppg 5.8 rpg 3.5apg 1.8spg 0.7 bpg 49.5% FG 38.8% 3PT FG

James Harden - Houston Rockets - PG

For:

If Westbrook hadn't conveniently averaged a triple-double, Harden’s numbers would have been the main talking point of the season. He's averaged the same amount of points as last year on top of 8 rebounds and around 11 assists. From a player who was considered as a ball-hog last year, he is averaging the most amount of assists in the country. He has also augmented his team's record from 41-41 to 55-27 while losing Dwight Howard - something that was probably good for the organisation. His argument is a lot like Westbrook, individual brilliance, except he added another 10 wins to claim the third seed in the wild Western conference. A leader, an MVP?

Against

Historically, the MVP has nearly always been given to a player that is part of a team that finishes in the top two of their respective conference seeming as this year’s frontrunners for the award seem to be Harden and Westbrook, that may not be the case after all. However, Harden looks to have got the worst of both sides. His numbers are only comparable to Westbrook but amazingly yet blatantly slightly less impressive seeming as he didn’t average as many boards nor points and his 55 wins is great but doesn’t quite match Kawhi’s Spurs. Most importantly however, is his coach. Mike (no D)’Antoni. D’Antoni hasn’t always excelled as a head coach but as we learnt with the Suns, if it works then it works. It is known that D’Antoni focuses on offense where the point guard is involved in all plays which a lot of the time, end up with someone chucking up a three. Point guards in particular thrive from the system seeing their numbers inflate. His shooting numbers aren’t incredible either.

Numbers: 29.1 ppg 8.1 rpg 11.2 apg 1.5 spg 0.5 bpg on 44% FG and 34.7% 3PT FG

Russell Westbrook - Oklahoma City Thunder - PG

For:

Westbrook is unbelievable. He marvellously does the unthinkable in the most breathtaking way we have seen. No one scored 57 points in a triple-double? Russ is on it. No one recorded more than 41 triple-doubles in a season? Russ has got 42. In fact, Russell Westbrook has 12 individual NBA records. That is 12 things nobody in the history of the world has ever achieved - a lot of them having been achieved this season. Russ’ triple double feat alone should speak volumes about his talent and performance this season. He was ranked first in ppg this season as well being ranked 10th in rpg despite being 7 inches smaller than the next smallest player in the top 10, and 3rd in assists per game. He has also proved to some degree that his triple doubles count for something as the Thunder have won to close to three fourths of their games when he records one. Despite the shedload of work he does, he ‘only’ averaged 34.6 mpg during the regular season which is below the likes of LeBron and Harden.

Against:

Westbrook may have set some staggering records but there was a reason for it. This was the reason Durant left Oklahoma. Russ is shooting around 42 percent from the field and 34 percent from three and considering the latter is respectable, his field goal percentage is abysmal compared to the likes of the league’s best. He is also being tasked with carrying the team due to the lack of structure around him as Sam Presti had to throw a team together after Durant’s departure. This is resulting in a usage rate higher than anyone’s ever before. And if Harden’s record wasn’t quite good enough for you, don’t even start with the Thunder’s record. They didn’t manage to catch up with the Clips or the Jazz resulting in a first-round matchup against the Rockets that they lost 4-1. An MVP or a freakishly athletic guard with too much room to operate in?

Numbers: 31.6 ppg 10.7 rpg 10.4 apg 1.6 spg 0.7 bpg on 42.5% FG and 34.3% 3PT FG

Next five:

5. Isaiah Thomas - Boston Celtics - PG - 28.9 ppg 2.7 rpg 5.9 apg

6. Giannis Antetokounmpo - Milwaukee Bucks - SG - 22.9 ppg 8.7 rpg 5.4 apg

7. John Wall - Washington Warriors - PG - 23.1 ppg 4.2 rpg 10.7 apg

8. Stephen Curry - Golden State Warriors - PG - 25.3 ppg 4.5 rpg 6.6 apg

9. Demar Derozan - Toronto Raptors - SG - 27.3 ppg 3.9 rpg 5.2 apg