MVPI: Sunil Narine Is Way Ahead!

Srinivas Bhogle and Purnendu Maji present Rediff.com's Most Valuable Player Index of IPL 2024 after Game 37.

Sunil Narine is currently the MVP of IPL 2024 with an MVPI of 568. Travis Head is second with an MVPI of 423.

MVPI collapses a player's batting, bowling and fielding performance into a single metric that converts player performance into a 'runs equivalent'.

The MVPI is the highest for batters who score a lot of runs at a high strike rate, and take a lot of wickets at a low economy rate.

Narine (286 runs at 176.5, and 7 wickets at 7.1) has done both, so it's not a surprise that he's the leader.

Head has 324 runs at a staggering strike rate of 216, so he's second.

While strike rates have dominated the narrative in this IPL, there's also been a lot of talk about player prices, partly because of the astronomical sums paid to Mitchell Starc and Pat Cummins.

If RCB had won its game against KKR, with Karn Sharma hitting Starc for 21 in the last over, there would have been hundreds of questions asked.

Even now, it is a very interesting question to ask. How much does a franchise pay a player for every MVPI point (or 'run equivalent')? Look at the player value or Paisa Vasool Index (PVI) (US$) of Narine and Head in the last column of the table.

Narine is 636 and Head is 968. Even Heinrich Klaasen is below 1000 at 841. These are fabulous steals!

There's no doubt that much bigger money awaits them at the big 2025 auction. Indeed, the valuation of batters who score at strike rates close to 200 is going to soar.

Just to get an idea, KKR is currently paying Starc $19,363, for each of the 77 MVPI points he has contributed so far. To compute PVI, we divide the money, $1,490,964, that Starc has earned after playing 7/14 matches, by his MVPI of 77.

We will carry MVPI and PVI updates every Monday as IPL continues its intoxicating journey.

Best Performing Players So Far In IPL 2024 (after Match 37 ending 22.4.24)

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