LeBron James is the NBA Finals MVP, win or lose
By Justin
Certain unwritten rules become so ingrained in our culture that it’s an uphill battle even discussing them. A Most Valuable Player, it’s insisted, is a winner; thus, we can’t even imagine an MVP of any kind on a losing team. There’s nothing officially written about the Finals MVP being one for the winning side. In fact, the first winner was famously Jerry West, who lost the finals to Bill Russell and the Boston Celtics. But these awards are signposts in history, and we all have to ask ourselves, What are they really for?
After six games, there’s no denying who’s been the best player in the series — LeBron James has distanced himself from his two embarrassing NBA Finals of 2007 and 2011, respectively, and he’s gained a reputation as a consistent playoff assassin. His stats are Herculean, averaging an eyeball-glazing 30.2 points, 11.3 rebounds, 8.5 assists, 2.7 steals, and 2.2 blocks per game. He’s doing this against one of the best teams ever and against a top-notch assortment of defenders, like Andre Iguodala and Draymond Green. This is the supposed Stuff of Legends where a singular force of nature imparts his will onto the game and creates wins from nothingness.
There’s no competition either from the other team — Stephen Curry has been mortal; Draymond Green missed a game and hasn’t taken over the series otherwise; Andre Iguodala is now struggling with back issues; Klay Thompson, who’s been fine, hasn’t nearly had the same kind of impact that LeBron has had. Some voters may want to use the “wonFfinals series” fact as a tie-breaker when voting for MVP, but there’s no Warrior who deserves the award right now, frankly. Some nuances of the game, like defense, are hard to quantify, but the gap is so large that even basic metrics see the truth; LeBron’s in the lead.
I’ve discussed this frequently, but you have to be transcendent to buck the odds and win the award as a loser. Through five games, LeBron didn’t have the best odds but he was close, and not much has changed. The problem is that there’s a large set of Finals series where, no matter how much better certain players perform, the award recipient is from the winning side. But the fact that LeBron has decent odds is impressive because from my finals modeling, the penalty for losing is enormous. Only one other “loser” had odds over 20%: Jerry West in 1969, which is the season, of course, where he grabbed the Finals MVP. The other two similar finals series performances were from Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in 1974 and from LeBron himself last year. This is rare.
I know one might point out the meaninglessness of commenting on a sports award — any award — and especially one without the reputation of, say, the regular season Most Valuable Player; but this is history. From the moment the award is handed out, history will be rewritten and even our memories will be warped, most likely, as the past disappears into the horizon. We’ll recall what happened and use the awards as a crutch, remembering the series from that perspective.
One great example is actually from the winning side: Willis Reed won the finals MVP in 1970, but he probably was not the most valuable player because he missed one game and was partially ineffective in another due to an injury. This was, of course, the series with the so-called “Willis Reed game” where he surprised fans in a Game 7 by walking onto the court at pregame, and thus drew all the attention of the media from then until now. Walt Frazier was their most valuable player, yet he is not who people remember partly because of the award and partly because of the mythic injury. This has many implications, such as the fact that many publications like Slam Online will declare Willis Reed is the greater of the two. Our brains are designed to pick out what’s interesting, not necessarily what’s most relevant.
There are also a few examples of losing warriors who deserve more credit, like Dwyane Wade in 2011 or Dr. Julius Erving in 1977, who was never completely respected in the NBA because Moses Malone was the alpha during Dr. J’s only title in 1983; but Dr. J did not play poorly in ’77. LeBron has got the best case of grievances here, as he could come away with a lot of ammunition for critics if he loses. A Finals MVP would at least be an official statement implying his team lost, but he performed well at the highest stage. These “meaningless awards” are still tallied constantly on major networks during career retrospectives, and that’s never going to stop.
Win or lose, LeBron James has been the most impressive player in the series — barring something weird and/or epic during Game 7 — and having worse teammates should not preclude him from winning a “Most Valuable” award over a handful of guys with sketchy cases. Decades from now, if LeBron comes away completely empty-handed, someone could look back at this series and think, this is the time the over-the-hill LeBron got ousted, again, by Stephen Curry. But that is not what is happening, and we owe it our league’s history to vote with some accuracy. We all know who the most valuable player has been so far, and it’s about time to kill this pattern and vote logically.