NBA Finals MVP: The new coin of the realm

This week, like most of you, I’ve been reading Robert W. Merry’s book on James K. Polk’s presidency, A Country of Vast Designs. In it, you can read how Polk, an extreme dark horse, was ultimately nominated for the presidency in a spectacular moment of groupthink and what the sociologist Émile Durkheim would have called “collective effervescence” — the spontaneous generation of a sweeping feeling of community, leading on to collective action. In this case, the Democratic party was deeply riven by pro and anti-slavery factions, and pro- and anti-factions regarding the annexation of Texas, resulted in a frustratingly deadlocked convention between ex-president Martin Van Buren and, primarily, Lewis Cass, a senator from Michigan. After nine ballots, Polk emerged as a compromise candidate and narrowly beat out Henry Clay for the presidency.

I think a surprising number of basketball decisions have been made this way. As a Dallas Mavericks fan, I deeply love Steve Nash, but I’ll never not feel like his two MVPs were the result of some bored sportswriters saying to themselves, “y’know, why NOT Steve Nash?” And then, a sudden, weird wave swept the whole dang country at exactly the right time. The next year, because Nash had done exactly the same thing, and maybe even a little better, people were trapped. I don’t need to belabor the point, but suffice it to say however good you think Steve Nash, you probably don’t think he’s as good as any other two-time MVP, other than Bob Pettit who barely counts because he played basketball approximately when King Richard the Lionhearted was King of England. What fraction of as good was his career as three-time winners like Larry Bird and Magic Johnson?

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This brings us, perhaps a little more circuitously than necessary, to the curious case of Andre Iguodala, Finals MVP. There is, simply put, no reason this should ever have happened. Iggy is a nice, versatile player, and was very good in his prime. In the 2015 Finals, Stephen Curry finished with a line of 26 points, 6.3 assists and 5.2 rebounds per game on shooting splits of .443/.385/.885 and got better as the series went along. Iggy put up 16.3 points, 5.8 rebounds and 4.0 assists with splits of .521/.400/.357, decent enough numbers, but he got it on the defense he supposedly played on LeBron James, who averaged 35.8 points, 13.3 rebounds and 8.8 assists.

Giving Iggy the Finals MVP because Steph slightly underwhelmed, while he surprised, and because LeBron’s heroics were not quite enough to win that year was a moment of super bizarre collective effervescence that would have had a different result 9.5 times out of 10. It was also probably because LeBron himself should have won but guys on the losing team never win.

I bring all this up to you, readers, for a simple reason. Every sportswriter on Earth is familiar with the “ringz” argument, so-called because of the extraordinary importance granted to the act of winning a championship, no matter the stats or any other factor. Championships are supposed by some to be such an act of pure will that even if you can’t find it anywhere in the box score or an advanced box score, the ring itself proves how good a person was, having achieved it by wanting it very much even if not by performing particularly well.

In an era in which superstar team-ups are increasingly common, I predict that Finals MVPs will become the stock coin of the realm, superseding #ringz. It’s a bold prediction, but not, I think, off the reservation. If the Spurs were to win next year, for example, it’s not going to enhance LaMarcus Aldridge’s reputation much, even if he went there from Portland explicitly for that purpose. If anything, Kevin Love seems worse, at least for now, for being a role player on LeBron’s team than he did as the star of a team that never made the playoffs.

Given that, I think as far as reputation goes, Finals MVP is going to go a long way towards how we think of whoever wins it. Steph Curry, for example, needs a little bit of redemption despite everything. To lose the Finals after winning the most regular season games in history and being named unanimous MVP haunts a guy, fairly or unfairly. The fact that Iggy, and not he, was named Finals MVP in their only successful visit so far begins to build a narrative. I think Steph Curry is far and away the most important player on the Warriors, but this year it’s also the case that he was joined by a guy who most people would have said was a slightly better player, which adds another dimension.

What I think about when I think about this stuff is what we’ll be talking about going into next year. If LeBron wins it, and there’s probably no universe in which the Cavs win and he doesn’t get it, it’ll be another plank in the growing conversation about whether LBJ is, after all, better than MJ. If Steph wins it, the murmurs about his place in history, not yet very loud, will get quiet again. But what if it’s someone else? Will we be talking about whether the Warriors are really KD’s team now? Will we wonder whether Steph’s MVP year, in a career that blossomed late, and has really only had that one transcendent season, might have been a bit of an aberration?

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Steph Curry is absolutely one of the best players in the league right now, and the numbers won’t always show it for the obvious reason that almost nobody that good has ever had teammates this good, too. But that has seemed like an uncommonly common situation of late, with LeBron, Love and Kyrie, after LeBron, Bosh and Wade, and basketball’s Mount Rushmore is, of course, pretty darn small.

Narratives drive how we watch the game, fairly or unfairly, as well as how we remember it. And so there’s a lot at stake, not just for this year, but for years to come.