If you're a basketball fan — particularly an NBA fan — you've undoubtedly heard by now that the Golden State Warriors point guard Stephen Curry won this year's MVP award. The only other real contender was James Harden of the Houston Rockets, but also in the mix were LeBron James (as usual), Anthony Davis, and Russell Westbrook. Personally, I think Curry was the right pick, but no one could have argued all that bitterly had Harden won.

Needing to learn a little R, though, and inspired by a series of density charts looking at the game-by-game distribution of QB ratings for NFL quarterbacks, I decided to look at the distribution of GameScores (GmSc) among the top 5 MVP candidates for this year's NBA season. GmSc is based on John Hollinger's Player Efficiency Rating statistic, and while it has its problems, namely overvaluing scoring, it's good enough for my own modest purposes. The equation for GmSc is as follows:

The statistic is standardized so that a GmSc of 10 represents an average game.

The plots below were created using the ggplot2 package, which, as a n00b, I'm a fan of for its simplicity and the beauty of its graphical outputs.