The Book of Basketball (38 page)

(Sound of a record screeching to a halt.)

Wait, you don’t believe me? Can you name the last ten NFL MVPs? You can’t. Can you name the last ten MVPs in each baseball league, then definitively
say which guy was better each year? Nope. Do you even know the name of the NHL MVP trophy, much less the last ten winners?
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Unless you’re Canadian, probably not. Only the NBA taps the full potential of the Most Valuable Player concept: everyone plays against each other, it’s relatively simple to compare statistics, and if you watch the games, you can almost always figure out which players stand out. You only have to follow the season. If you combine the MVP voting with the All-NBA teams, the playoff results, and individual statistics, you end up with a reasonable snapshot of exactly what happened that NBA season, much like how the four major Oscar awards reasonably capture what happened in Hollywood from year to year.

Of course, there are exceptions. Charles Barkley won the ’93 MVP even though Jordan was still the best player alive and proved it authoritatively in the Finals. Well, you know whose name sits next to “1993 NBA MVP” for the rest of eternity? Barkley. That’s just the way this crap works. One year later,
Forrest Gump
won Best Picture over
The Shawshank Redemption
and
Pulp Fiction.
If you could only watch one of those three movies again, which one would you pick? I bet you’re not picking
Gump.
If you’re old enough to remember walking out of the theater after those three movies in ’94, which one left you the most blown away? Again I bet you’re not picking
Gump.
I remember seeing a
Shawshank
matinee with my girlfriend at the time,
⁷
limping out of the theater in disbelief, then sitting in her car afterward having an “I can’t believe how freaking amazing that was” conversation and not departing the parking lot for fifteen solid minutes. That definitely didn’t happen when I walked out of
Gump.
Although I do remember wondering how Jenny Gump died of AIDS when it hadn’t been created yet.

So why didn’t
Shawshank
win the Oscar? Because it had a crappy title.
⁸
If they had gone with a generic Hollywood title like
Hope Is a Good Thing
or
Crawling to Freedom
, more potential moviegoers would have understood
the premise and seen it. When flipping through movie times in a 1994 newspaper, you weren’t gravitating toward the prison movie with the confusing title and a douche like Tim Robbins in the leading role. Believe me, I was nearly one of those people. I specifically remember
not
wanting to see
Shawshank
until my dad (an early
Shawshank
lover) told me something crazy like, “Look, if you don’t see this movie within the next forty-eight hours, I’m coming over and severing your carotid artery with a machete.” Now? It’s one of the greatest titles of all time. I wouldn’t change a thing about it. Back then, it probably cost that movie $75 million and the Oscar. As for MJ, he didn’t win the ’93 MVP because everyone was tired of voting for him. That’s the only reason. And it’s a shitty one.

Which brings us back to the point of this chapter: Just because somebody won an Oscar or an MVP doesn’t necessarily mean he deserved it. Since the MVP means more to the NBA than any other sport, and since we’re headed for a mammoth “Evaluating the Best Players Ever” section in a few pages that involves an Egyptian pyramid—no, really—I thought we’d travel back in time and correct every mistake or injustice in MVP history. I’m also creating a Playoffs MVP because it’s nonsensical that we have awards for the regular season and Finals, but nothing covering every playoff series including the Finals. For example, the 2007 Spurs wouldn’t have won without Tim Duncan, their entire low-post offense, best defender, best rebounder, best shot blocker and emotional leader. With nearly eight hundred games (including playoffs) and one knee surgery already on his odometer, Duncan had learned to pace himself during the regular season by then, concentrating on defense and rebounding and saving his offensive energy for message games and playoff games. In the regular season, he played 80 games and finished with a 20–11–3, shooting a career-high .546 from the field and making first-team All-NBA. Then he averaged a 22–12 and blocked 62 shots in 20 playoff games as the Spurs swept Cleveland in the Finals. So what happened? A French guy (Tony Parker) stole Finals MVP honors for lighting up a particularly poor group of Cleveland point guards, averaging a 30–4 in the sweep and shooting .568 from the field.
⁹

Let’s say your great-grandkid looks back at that season sixty years from now. Dirk Nowitzki won the MVP, Tony Parker won the Finals MVP … and other than his first-team All-NBA spot and solid playoff numbers, how would you discern that Duncan,
by far
, was the crucial player on the best team of the 2006–7 season? You couldn’t. That’s why there should be a regular-season MVP, a Finals MVP
and
a Playoffs MVP, and that’s why I’m handing out my imaginary Playoffs MVP, creating a universal definition for regular-season MVP and settling every erroneous pick since 1956. But before we get there, three crucial MVP wrinkles have to be mentioned:

Wrinkle no. 1.
The first award was given out for the 1955–56 season, with players controlling MVP votes and writers handling All-NBA first and second teams. (Only one rule: players couldn’t vote for anyone on their own team.) I know they were still finding their way in the mid-fifties, and granted, this was the same league that played for eight years before realizing it needed a shot clock. But given the racial climate of the fifties and the general resistance to the influx of black players, how could anyone have expected a fair vote when 85–90 percent of the players were white? Wasn’t it more of a popularity contest than anything? When you apply the “best player is decided by his peers” concept to modern times, you can see its inherent dangers and potential for a lack of objectivity. Critics are critics for a reason—it’s their job to objectively evaluate things. You can’t expect players to suddenly become impartial reviewers. For instance, let’s say the 2008 players considered Kobe to be a world-class bully, egomaniac and phony.
¹⁰
Under this scenario, if they were voting for the 2008 MVP, would Kobe have had any chance of pulling it out over Chris Paul, a player everyone respected and loved?
¹¹
And considering the Hornets loved Paul and wanted him to win, wouldn’t they have voted for someone without a real chance like LeBron? NBA players should only be voting for things like Worst B.O., Guy You Don’t Want to Leave Alone with Your Girlfriend,
Least Likely Star to Pick Up a Check, Toughest Poker Competitor, Ugliest Player and Craziest Mothafucka You Don’t Want to Cross.

Wrinkle no. 2.
Starting with the 1979–80 season, a handpicked committee of journalists and broadcasters was given the voting reins, creating more problems for obvious reasons (some might not follow the entire league, some might be biased toward the guy they’re watching every night, some might be dopes about the NBA) and less obvious ones (recognizable stars now had an advantage, as did someone without a trophy competing against a previous winner). Starting in the early nineties, a more subtle problem developed: a group almost entirely composed of middle-aged white journalists couldn’t identify with the current direction of the league, missed the access they once had and openly despised the new generation of me-first, chest-pounding, posse-having, tattoo-showing, commercial-shooting overpaid stars but were still being asked to objectively decide on the MVP. I’d say that’s a problem. I once asked a well-known basketball writer if he had DirecTV’s NBA Season Pass, and he recoiled in disgust, like I had asked him if he’d ever been to a sex club and banged someone through a glory hole or something. And this was a guy with an MVP vote. Can we really rely on the over-fifty, “I used to love the NBA before the league went to hell” demographic to make the right decisions?

Wrinkle no. 3.
Current voters openly confess to being confused about the voting criteria, mainly because the NBA powers that be willingly facilitated that confusion by never defining the term “valuable.” They
like
when radio hosts and writers get bent out of shape about it. They
want
voters to wonder if it’s an award for the best player or the most valuable one, or both, or two-thirds one part and one-third the other part, or whatever ratio someone ends up settling on. We only know the following:

1. It’s an award for the regular season only.
   

2. Candidates have to play at least 55 games.
   

3. Whoops, that’s all we know.
   

See how we might have trouble coming up with the right pick annually? That’s why I pored through every season making sure that every
choice was either completely valid, relatively valid, or invalid, applying my own definition of the MVP, a formula I have been revising and redefining for an entire decade before finally settling on the language for life last summer.
¹²
My definition hinges on four questions weighted by importance (from highest to lowest):

Question no. 1: If you replaced each MVP candidate with a decent player at his position for the entire season, what would be the hypothetical effect on his team’s records?
You can’t define the word “valuable” any better. Say you switched Chris Paul for Kirk Hinrich during the summer of ’07. How would the next Hornets season have turned out? They won 57 games in a historically tough conference with an offense geared around Paul’s once-in-a-generation skills, and if that’s not enough, he was a beloved leader, teammate, and team spokesman. Switch him with Hinrich and they’re probably 30–52 instead of 57–25, and that’s without mentioning how Paul saved basketball in New Orleans and evolved into one of the NBA’s true ambassadors. Ranking the 2008 MVP candidates only by this question, Paul ranks first, Kevin Garnett second, LeBron James third, Kobe Bryant fourth, and Earl Barron fifth.
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Question no. 2: In a giant pickup game with every NBA player available and two knowledgable fans forced to pick five-man teams, with their lives depending on the game’s outcome, who would be the first player picked based on how everyone played that season?
¹⁴
Translation: who’s the alpha dog that season? The Finals answer this question many times … but not
every
time. We thought Kobe was the alpha dog in 2008, but after watching him wilt
¹⁵
against Boston in the Finals—compared to the way LeBron carried a crappy Cavs team to seven games against Boston and nearly stole Game 7—it’s unclear. This question reduces everything to the simplest of
terms: we’re playing to 11, I need to win, I can’t screw around with this choice, and if I don’t pick this guy, he’s gonna get pissed and kick our asses as the second pick. I mean, imagine the look on ’97 MJ’s face if someone picked ’97 Karl Malone before him in a pickup game. It would have been like Michael Corleone in
Godfather Part II when
Kay informed him about her abortion.

Question no. 3: Ten years from now, who will be the first player from that season who pops into my head?
Every season belongs to someone to varying degrees. Why? Just like the political media can affect a primary or a presidential campaign, the basketball media can swing an MVP race. They shape every argument and story for ten months, with their overriding goal being to discuss potentially provocative angles, stories or controversies that haven’t been picked apart yet. There’s no better example than the ’93 season: Jordan was still the best, but the controversial Barkley had just been swapped to Phoenix, then made a leap of sorts at the ’92 Olympics, emerging as the team’s most compelling personality and second-best player. Pigeonholed during his final Philly years as a hotheaded, controversial lout who partied too much, wouldn’t shut his trap and showed truly terrible judgment—epitomized by the incident when he accidentally spat on a young fan, followed by the story being twisted around to “Barkley spits on young fan!”—suddenly everyone was embracing Chuck Wagon’s sense of humor and candor. Once he started pushing an already good Suns team to another level, Barkley became
the
story of the ’92–’93 season, a bona fide sensation on Madison Avenue and the most charismatic personality in any sport.
¹⁶

Should that “transformation” have made him the most valuable player in 1993? Well, the ’92 Suns won 53 games, shot 49.2 percent from the field, scored 112.7 points per game and gave up 106.2. The ’93 Suns won 62 games, shot 49.3 percent, scored 113.4 and gave up 106.7. They rebounded better with Barkley but he weakened them defensively. Maybe they had a better overall team in ’93, but didn’t free agent pickup Danny
Ainge, rookies Oliver Miller and Richard Dumas, emerging third-year player Cedric Ceballos and new coach Paul Westphal deserve a little credit? You also can’t discount what happened in the Western Conference: following a particularly strong ’92 campaign that featured four 50-win teams and nine above-.500 teams in all, only six ’93 teams finished above .500 and the eighth playoff seed went to a 39-win Lakers team. Barkley’s regular-season impact, purely from a basketball standpoint, wasn’t nearly as significant as everyone believed. Admittedly, he injected that franchise with swagger, gave them a proven warrior and inside force, boosted home attendance, helped turn them into title favorites and pushed a very good team up one level. For lack of a better word, he owned that season. When you think of ’92–’93, you think of Barkley and the Suns first; then you think, “Wait, wasn’t that the year Chicago pulled out the Charles Smith Game and then MJ single-handedly destroyed Phoenix in the Finals?” Still, ownership of a season shouldn’t swing the voting. In ’93, it did. That’s just a fact.