Qiu Dang

Message Topic Search Topic Options Post Reply Create New Topic Printable Version Translate Topic

 ZApenholder wrote:

can't really compare a teams sports like soccer or basketball (with MVPs), with individual playing sports like table tennis.

a players play time vs performance in team sports is different to table tennis where players don't play the same amount of matches/games.

If they play equal the amount of matches, then maybe, just maybe an MVP would make sense. other than that, that table has no purpose (ie, each 3 players, playing 3 matches, so total 9 matches that are played even after a team wins would provide a fair platform to choose your mvp)

Now back to table tennis, any one who has played teams before, would know that the players placement is very strategic - why? for the team to win, not the players win/loose table.

IE, you might put a better player in match 3, to play against your opponents weaker player and to make sure you take that point.
or, what is the purpose of taking your 2nd best player, to play against the best  and 2nd best of opponent, where the wins for both is unlikely.
So you could sacrifice a player to loose 2, and aim for your other 2 players to win 3.
France vs Germany was like that, but the French playing 3 failed and that was the main match that caused Germany to win - that guarantee point was not secured.

Table tennis team events can't be compared to team sports because team events are not team sports (yes, sarcasm)...

There is absolutely nothing wrong with pointing out who scored the most goals in the World Cup and giving them an award.  Does that make them the best player or goalscorer?  Of course not.  Same with pointing out the player who has won the most team matches.  Even in world cup, some teams go out in the first or second round while others may go out in the finals.  But the world cup doesn't say because someone scored 7 goals in 7 matches and another guy scored 5 in 3 matches that the 7 goals are fewer.

I get that you don't like the individual awards, but let's stop making arguments just because we don't like the ITTF.  If they wanted a most valuable player award, like most tournaments in any sport, they would put it to a vote of experts.  If they don't put it to a vote and they just want to reward players with the most wins, obviously that has issues, but many things have issues.  Even expert voting has issues.

Even in soccer, sometimes you play formations that reduce the utility of your best scorers etc.  We don't have to like how the ITTF selects or ranks the players in these events, but we need to stop acting like these issues are not common to sports in general - they are not special to table tennis.

Edited by NextLevel - 10/04/2022 at 12:30am