The NBA MVP Award: We Gave it Kobe Because We Should Have Given it to Him in 2006. Our Bad

I'm cranky tonight. Let's just get that out there now. I was all set to watch Game 2 of the Hornets/Spurs series tonight. Really, I was looking forward to it. I was looking forward to David West, the underrated All-star of underrated all-stars torching the Spurs yet again. Was looking forward to Chris Paul doing things we've never seen a six foot point guard do (Even though Paul will go down as a better player in history that Deron Williams, I will forever be ok with Utah taking Williams in 2005 3rd instead of Paul because he fits their system, which is exactly what they said on draft day. And he does. The Bucks and Hawks taking Andrew Bogut and Marvin Williams ahead of both? Yeah not so much). I was just plain fired up to see the Spurs lose. I really was. But instead, three Canadian "sports" networks were treating me to WWE rastlin', Sportscentre (misspelled intentionally. Isn't that just dumb? Everyone knows it's "er".) was showing two hours of hockey highlights, and then was heading right to poker. And Sportsnet? Are you ready for this? A Canadian metric ghetto gangster raptastic show...ABOUT THE FREAKING NBA!?!?!? I can just see the genius at Sportsnet now "Hmmmm... so you're telling me we could actually show an NBA playoff game...or a ghetto gangster POS show ABOUT the NBA? Well hell, of course we'll show the ghetto gangster raptastic show! I love that one! Why would anybody want to watch the actual games?" I hate Canada.

By the way, they sure did show the Pistons/Magic game earlier though. Thanks for that. Nobody outside of Detwah or Orlando cares about that series. It's over already. Orlando will win game three because Detwah is already looking ahead to the conference Finals, and maybe they'll sneak out game four because the Pistons still won't care, but I can tell you right now the Pistons win it. I don't need to watch it, although the Dwight Howard dunk over Jason Maxiell (to show you how little I care about this series, I'm not even looking up his name to spell it right. Deal with it. I said I was cranky. Now get me a kokanee!) in the third quarter was nice. Did you see it? The one where Howard grabs an offensive board, he and Maxiel go back up at the same time, except Howard goes two feet higher and 200 times faster AND WITH TWO HANDS and thumps one on poor Maxiel? I'm enjoying the Dwight Howard Era. Not as much as I would have enjoyed the freaking Hornets/Spurs game, but still.

So anyway, before I got distracted with my hatred for Canada and it's gawd-awful pathetic excuses for sports channels, I was going to rant about Kobe Bryant getting the MVP award. It's not that Kobe's not a great player, and it's not that he wasn't in the top five finalists for the award. It's just that the voters, aka sportswriters, gave him this award not so much for what he did this year, but because he's a great player and has never won an MVP. They felt bad because they realize that Kobe should have won in 2006 instead of Steve Nash, so this year? Might as well the hell not!

Look, call me crazy, and many have, but I like for my MVP awards to be NOT be influenced by votes for the award from past years. This is what drove me most crazy about "Steve Nash 2-time MVP!" He was not the most valuable player in the league either of the years he won it, but he WAS the MVP the year after when he should have won it! Why didn't he? Because the voters didn't want to give him three straight MVP's because of the company it would put him in! Really? So because you guys screwed up the vote the past two year's let's NOT give it to him when he most deserves it? Awesome. Great thinking. Makes a lot of sense.

ANYWAY, Kobe was certainly one of the five best players this season, as he led his team to the best record in a ridiculously deep Western Conference while averaging 28.3 points, 6.3 boards, and 5.4 assists per game. Pretty impressive numbers really, until we consider two things: 1) his culmaltive numbers the last three seasons were better and b) his teammates were a helluva lot better! OF COURSE his team did better when they fleece Memphis for Pau Gasol, Andrew Bynum, at least until he got hurt, morphed into an all-star caliber big man, and their young bench finally started to develop. Kobe's numbers weren't as good as the past two or three years, but because his teammates finally started playing better and his GM fleeced the Grizz for an all-star power forward, that makes Kobe the MVP? Really?

Then there's the idea of how he compares to his competition this season. ESPN.com's John Hollinger has come up with a stat called PER, which takes all the positive things you can do on a basketball court and divides them by all the negative things you can do and puts it into one number. As he himself says, this should not be considered the be-all, end-all of basketball stats, but it's certainly a damn good measurement of a player's abilities. The number one "PER rating" in the league this year (by the way, a PER of 15 is considered league average)? Lebron (PER of 29.23). Second? Chris Paul (28.39). Kobe was eighth (24.31), ranking behind Amare Stoudamire (27.61), KG (25.30), Dirk Diggler (24.66), and two Spurs Timmy Duncan (24.41) and Manu GINOBILI (sorry channeling my inner Charles Barkley there. Manu's per was 24.34).

Again, this is not the all-encompassing stat, but it's certainly a good barometer for where he ranks among his peers, and this says he was eighth. While I don't think he was eighth in the MVP race, he certainly was a long ways from first. Looking at the other guys on the list, Manu and TD cancel each other out, since both were undervalued and overlooked on yet another good Spurs team. The Diggler's Mavs team struggled to make the playoffs, and there's no way Amare gets a look at MVP when a)he plays with Nash and b) his big numbers didn't come until after the Shaq trade. So that leaves us with four guys: Kobe, LBJ, CP3, and KG.

KG's case is very similar to Kobe's. His individual numbers weren't as good as past seasons, but his teammates were much better. Garnett was deserving of the Defensive Player of the Year award, and I have no doubts he was a gigantic emotional presence on that team, but he missed too much time and to me was no more valuable that Paul Pierce. Lebron is quite simply the best player on the planet. He average 30 points, eight boards and seven assists a game. Good lord stop and look at those numbers. LOOK AT THOSE!! While Lebron never developed into the "more athletic version of Magic Johnson" that I hoped he'd become, that's still damn impressive. Beyond it really. His team, on the other hand, was and is awful. Getting them to fourth place, even in the crappy Eastern Conference, still counts as a great accomplishment in my books. If you gave Lebron the MVP for this year, I would have no problems with it whatsoever. He's the best player in the league, and if it wasn't for him, Cleveland could have quite easily been the worst team this year.

However, if I had an MVP vote (because of all the moving around I think it got lost in the mail. Then again when the Canadian postal system works by strapping your mail onto the back of a beaver and telling it "go on! Find Jeff! Go on! Find his igloo village!" well it's probably not the moving around), it would go to Chris Paul. If Paul played in New York, LA, Boston, Chicago, or anywhere else but Toronto or Memphis, he'd be the MVP in a landslide. His numbers (21.1 pts, 11.6 assts and 2.7 stls- both of which led the league- and a 4.61/1 assist-to-turnover ratio) stand alone as impressive. As Hollinger's PER stat shows, his cumulative totals were the second best in the NBA behind LBJ. His team went from 39 wins a year ago to 56 this year, good for second spot in the West. And unlike Kobe or KG, CP3 had the same core of players this year as last. While 100% of that success cannot be given to Paul, I would say he's responsible for a much larger amount of that than anyone else on the Hornets. Add it all up, and Chris Paul should be your 2007-08 MVP instead of Kobe.

But hey, look on the bright side: next season, or the year after, when the voters realized they should have given it to Paul this season, then CP3 can be given a "Lifetime Achievement" Award too!