The current format for the NBA scoring title is valid

There's not really any weighing analysis of the presented points by either side, so the best I can do is some side-by-side comparisons of the presented positions and how well given points stand in the end.

Pro argues that it's better to do PPG because it affords injured players a chance to compete. He argues that the threshold of 58 games is fair because it reaches a threshold of 70% of games, and that wins within those games imply a greater scoring capability than would be captured in an average across all games. He presents a link and asserts that the winners of this title are all deserving.

Breaking this down, I think Pro's first point is his strongest, but needed some more analysis to increase its weight. In particular, I think some analysis of the pressure athletes would be under to return to the court before they are fully healed would have made this point stand out more. The remaining points seem rather arbitrary, as Con points out. Pro tries to justify this by saying that it's "a significant sample size," but since that's also a bare assertion, I don't have any reason to favor it. Similarly, the link doesn't establish anything positive or negative about that list of scorers, so just saying that they're "pretty dynamic scorers" doesn't do anything to help your position.

Con argues that PPG is misleading, that durability should be a factor in determining the scoring title, that 58 games as the baseline could be used to game the system, and that there have been instances where players did not get their due as a result.

The first point isn't particularly strong since it's unclear what "misleading" means in terms of harm. Is it that fans are confused by the result? Players? Coaches? Does it being misleading somehow affect outcomes? I end up buying Pro's point that this is an issue of semantics. If it's been known and accepted as is for years, then the actual harm of the terminology being a little wonky isn't clear. The second point suffers from a similar problem to Pro's first until it gets into the 58 game threshold, which I'll get to shortly. It's unclear from Con's argument why durability should be under consideration. Con mentions socialism and puts "load management" in quotes, but he doesn't explain why toughness is a meaningful metric. Con also says that it's beneficial to be "playing through his injuries", which is unjustified and seems counter-intuitive, especially when we're talking about the most dynamic scorer and not the MVP, as Pro points out. The third point is more meaningful, especially since we get a concrete example, but telling me Michael Jordan won the award 10 times instead of 11 doesn't seem like a massive loss. It helps that Con provides a link here that suggests greater harm affecting more people, though Con really should be doing more than just pointing to a single player to make his point.

That just leaves Con's main point: that players might game the system. I think this does have broad implications for the NBA, so it clearly has a potential for high impact. The problem is that is comes off as just that: potential. If players are "using the games against top defenses as rest days" or sitting out games they could easily play in for spurious reasons, then there should be evidence that that is happening. What I see is data that shows that some players are winning the title with lower numbers of games played, but that doesn't demonstrate the point that players are gaming the system, it just suggests that there could be gaming happening.

And this is where that lack of weighing analysis gets tricky. Pro's main point is that giving injured players a chance to get the title is a net positive, which is good for some players, but Pro doesn't spell out any broader implications. Con's main point is that players might game the system and that sometimes that results in some worthy players losing out on the title, which does have a more solid impact given that there is a list of actual players who haven't gotten the title as a result of the PPG system, but Con implies a much broader effect than he demonstrates.

I end up voting Con by a narrow margin. I think Pro's argument had the most potential, but it just comes off as "let's give injured players a chance," which is a nice sentiment, but not a potent impact sans expansion. It doesn't help that I don't get discrete examples of players who have been helped by this, just the suggestion that there are many. Meanwhile, even if I don't fully buy Con's argument that players are gaming the system, at the very least I have a concrete set of people who have been affected by the PPG system in a way that does not reflect their record, so I can see an actual harm. That admittedly lower impact harm beats Pro's potential benefit.