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Welcome to the Ringer NBA Show. It's Playoff Time and you better to talk to them the studio of the Ringer Bill Simmons.

It was a bill.

How are you? I'm excited.

You sound excited. I read your MVP cam this morning.

And James Harden, huh?

Yeah, it took a while to get there. I didn't really thought I don't think this was the best MVP race ever.

But I definitely thought I was the most polarizing and it was the most entertaining.

You know, we'll miss it. Great. Was every candidate was flawed in some way.

There was really good reason to pick against each one.

And I think that's why people had so much trouble with that.

I think Westbrook's going to win. I didn't pick him. Spoiler alert, I picked James Harden.

I just thought the more I looked at it and broke it down and stared at it from every direction.

You know, if you're picking Russ as the MVP or picking him because of offense basically and of the impact of what he did this season and the performance side of it, which I get.

But I just think Harden was just better offensively. He put up basically the same stats.

Yeah, I think he averaged a 29, 11, and 8. And Russ was that, 32, 11, and 10.

And he was like 94% of what Russ is that's where. But he took like 400 less shots.

You know, and I really did think he made his teammates better. And that was a team that going into the season, people thought we're going to be a 500 team.

They thought Harden was a mess. I mean, I didn't even vote for him for any of my own.

I'm 18 last year. I thought he was turning into a D.H. He had a very strange season.

And then he goes into any place point card, learns how to do that. He basically does national stun.

He said he take whatever national is doing the mid 2000s and they bring it to a whole other level.

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