Baseball’s history shows OKC star will be MVP

Oscar Robertson didn’t win the MVP voting the year he averaged a triple double. Of course, the Big O was in the land of giants.

That’s the season, 1961-62, that Wilt Chamberlain averaged 50.4 points and 25.7 rebounds per game.

Wilt didn’t win the MVP, either. Bill Russell won it for leading the Celtics to a 60-20 record.

NBA statistical analysis wasn’t all that sophisticated in 1962. NBA

statistics weren’t all that sophisticated. In 1962, the NBA had been tracking rebounds for only 11 years. You can find the wild pitches, batters faced and grounded into double plays for each member of the 1871 Philadelphia Athletics, but 79 years later, you still couldn’t get the rebounds for George Mikan with the Minneapolis Lakers.

So there’s no great reason to believe anyone got excited about Oscar’s feat, or really even recognized it as such.

Then the NBA went 55 years before a player again scaled such a summit, and the world was transfixed by Russell Westbrook. When Westbrook hit Victor Oladipo for a layup early in the third quarter of the Thunder’s April 7 game in Phoenix, Westbrook had secured a season triple double. He finished the season averaging 31.6 points, 10.7 rebounds and 10.4 assists.

Appreciation for such numbers has exploded