Whether Cavs win or lose, LeBron James should be the Finals MVP

— -- LeBron James' monster triple-double in Sunday's Game 5 of the NBA Finals (40 points, 14 rebounds and 11 assists) wasn't enough to lead his Cleveland Cavaliers to victory over the Golden State Warriors, who took a 3-2 lead in the series.

But James was dominant enough to suggest that, barring an unexpected collapse in Game 6 or Game 7 -- if necessary -- he should be chosen Bill Russell NBA Finals Most Valuable Player no matter the outcome of the series.

Losing MVP precedent

As you've surely heard by now, the only player to win Finals MVP on a team that lost the series was also the first Finals MVP awarded: Jerry West with the  Los Angeles Lakers in 1969, when they lost to the Boston Celtics in seven games.

At that point, however, the concept of selecting a player from a losing team wasn't quite as foreign as it seems today. West also won Most Outstanding Player of the 1959 NCAA tournament for a West Virginia team that lost the final to California, the fourth consecutive year the award went to a player on a losing team. The very first NCAA tournament Most Outstanding Player (Jimmy Hull of Ohio State in 1939) was from the losing team, and between 1953 and 1971 more than half (10 of 19) of all MOPs did not win the title.

During the 1970s, sentiment hardened in favor of picking a player from the championship team as Most Outstanding Player (the elimination of the NCAA's third-place game in 1982 helped), and it hasn't happened since Hakeem Olajuwon in 1983.

A similar pattern is evident in the NFL (the only Super Bowl MVP from a losing team, Chuck Howley of the Dallas Cowboys, was chosen in 1971) and in MLB (the only losing World Series MVP, New York Yankees second baseman Bobby Richardson, was chosen in 1960). The only big four pro sport with a losing MVP in the past four decades is the NHL, whose Conn Smythe Trophy is awarded to the MVP of the playoffs rather than the Stanley Cup finals specifically. And even in the NHL, losing Conn Smythe winners were much more common in the 1960s and '70s (three times between 1966 and 1976) than recently (just twice since).

So what did it take for West to win in a losing cause in 1969? First, one of the closest Finals on record, a seven-game series where the Lakers outscored the Celtics by three points in aggregate and lost the deciding seventh game by two points 108-106. Like James, West carried a heavy load for his team, scoring 37.9 points per game (35.6 percent of the Lakers' total; James has scored 39.4 percent of the Cavaliers' points thus far) and handing out 7.4 assists per game. And West too had a triple-double: 42 points, 13 rebounds and 12 assists in Game 7. While Boston's John Havlicek had a great series in his own right (28.3 points, 11.0 rebounds and 4.4 assists per game), that was enough to name West the MVP.

Potentially historic losing performance

Advanced stats don't quite go back to 1969, so we can't compare James to West on a level playing field. But since the NBA started tracking individual turnovers in 1978, no player on a losing team has been as valuable to his team on a per-game basis as James has so far in this series. His 0.31 wins above replacement player per game by my metric would surpass then-teammate Dwyane Wade's performance in the Miami Heat's 2011 Finals loss to the Dallas Mavericks.

Wade actually rates better than James on a per-minute basis in 2011 -- so too, for that matter, does James' performance in last year's Finals against the San Antonio Spurs.

In terms of value, however, James' superhuman minutes totals against the Warriors give him the edge. The 45.6 minutes per game he's averaging make Wade's 39.0 MPG in 2011 and his own 37.8 average last year look downright leisurely.

Another interesting way to pose this question is to look at how often a player from the losing team has ended up rating as most valuable in the finals by WARP. That's happened six times since 1978. Among those, only two players have had a larger edge on the most valuable player from the winning team than James currently has over Stephen Curry (who has 1.1 WARP, ahead of teammate Andre Iguodala with 0.8, though Iguodala doesn't get full credit here for his yeoman's work defending James in this series).

For the most part, these edges haven't been convincing. MVP voters in 1998 certainly can't be blamed for giving the nod to Michael Jordan when he and Karl Malone had essentially identical WARP totals. For that matter, despite Shawn Kemp being "the best player on the court," in the words of his coach, George Karl, nobody but Jordan was winning MVP in 1996.

The only player with a credible case for winning MVP on a losing team in the past four decades until now was Wade in 2011, and voters never appeared to seriously entertain that notion. (It surely didn't help that Miami's Big Three was at the nadir of its popularity, while Finals MVP Dirk Nowitzki was feted for winning an overdue title.)

Even without the same kind of edge in advanced stats, James' performance in this series has a chance to reverse precedent. He's carrying a historic load, having used 41.1 percent of Cleveland's plays in the Finals, surpassing Jordan's 1998 record (40.7 percent) for Finals usage since turnovers were tracked. And Jordan didn't have the same kind of playmaking role in that series. James has already handed out 62 assists to Jordan's 24 in 1998.

Between field goals and assists, James has had a hand in 66 percent of the Cavaliers' field goals so far, smashing Jordan's post-merger high of 56 percent in 1991. For that matter, just three other players -- Kobe Bryant, Magic Johnson and Jason Kidd -- have been involved in more than half of their team's Finals field goals since the ABA-NBA merger. (West was at 53 percent in 1969.)

James has done it all with little help from his teammates. Remarkably, Kyrie Irving still rates as Cleveland's second-best player by WARP in this series (0.3) despite not playing since Game 1. How important has James been? In the 22 minutes he's spent on the bench in the series, the Cavaliers have been outscored by 13 points -- or 39.2 per 100 possessions, according to NBA.com/Stats. When James has rested, Cleveland has averaged 54.6 points per 100 possessions, barely half of its 97.2 offensive rating with James on the court.

There's still a chance James and the Cavaliers can render this argument moot by rallying to win the next two games and the series. But even if that doesn't happen, James has earned the right to win Finals MVP a third time, no matter the precedent.