MVPs: 0. Finals MVPs: 0. All-NBA 1st Team: 5. 2nd Team: 1. All Star: 10. MVP: 0.
Defensive POY: 0. All-Defense 1st Team: 4. 2nd Team: 5.
Assists Champ: 5.
Career Averages: 13 PPG/ 6 RPG/ 9 APG/ 1.9 SPG/ .3 BPG/ .464 eFG%/ .785 FT%.
Best Season: 17/ 7/ 11/ 2.3/ .4/ .476/ .757 (1998-99).
Postseason Averages: 13 PPG/ 7 RPG/ 8 APG/ 1.9 SPG/ .3 BPG/ .455 eFG%/ .781 FT%.
Best Postseason: 15/ 11/ 11/ 1.8/ .4/ .547/ .520 (2007).
Championships: 1 (#3 player). Runner-ups: 2 (#1 player on both).
Why he's below George Gervin: Kidd received a curiously low number of MVP votes during his career. He was 1st Team All-NBA 5 times but only finished in the top 5 of MVP voting twice. What did the All-NBA voters see that the MVP voters didn't? Kidd was a bad shooter, and analytic stats don't like him (probably because he was a bad shooter). Maybe MVP voters saw what analytics see, or maybe MVP voters are just biased toward scoring over passing and defense. My guess is that Kidd was very good at a lot of things, but he wasn't really elite at anything. He led the league in assists a few times, but he doesn't stand out as one of the best passers of the 90s or 00s the way Stockton or Nash do. He just knew how to run a team, which didn't impress MVP voters. Just my theory.
Why he's above the rest: Jason Kidd was one of the best all-around players of his era. Though he's only 4th in career triple-doubles, he led the league in triple doubles a record 11 times. If he played today when guards get more rebounds, I imagine he'd be getting at least 20 triple-doubles a year. He was also a great defender, making all-defense teams 9 times (a fact I didn't even realize until I started working on this list...I always thought Kidd was a mediocre defender). Kidd was good enough to be the best player on back-to-back Finals teams, won a championship near the end of his career when he was still good enough to average 8 assists per game. And he played long enough to be #2 all time in both assists and steals. Though his resume lacks the peaks that other players had, it doesn't have any holes. Even his biggest weakness, his shooting, was mitigated by his team management ability. He took fewer shots per game than anyone else on my list in order to lessen the impact of his missed shots. He may not have had the peak that most all-time great players had, but his intelligence and leadership enabled him to get the absolute maximum out of his career.
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