I literally said I was giving an anecdote and you still bolded me as if to say "gotcha."
The best thing you can say about the 2016 VP Debate is that it didn't cost Trump the election. With victory as the standard, you could just as easily say every VP debate in history was crucial to the election of the eventual President. You can apply that standard to anything you want. You could say the Vince Foster controversy helped Bill Clinton because "he won." It doesn't tell you anything, and it's a lazy way to make a case.
From an actual data standpoint, there's nothing to suggest the VP debate helped Trump. In fact, the data would suggest it actually hurt him. But we don't know that for certain either.