Since the NBA allowed its media, both mainstream and upstream, to start speculating on the Most Valuable Player award on Thanksgiving, the award has been essentially ruined.
And no, this isn’t because James Harden will finally win the award whose requirements have shifted twice in two years to keep him from winning it. He’s the most important player having the best season on the best team by deed rather than reputation. No argument here.
But Harden-as-MVP is was what we heard at the end of the 2017 calendar year because we as the chattering class started talking about the MVP award before New Year’s Day because we need opinions on things well before they have either sufficient data or sufficient thought. And that reduced the attention paid to compelling arguments being put together by Anthony Davis and Damian Lillard and DeMar DeRozan. I will even give you the old-timer argument that LeBron James should be in the discussion should you choose to employ it.
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But nobody’s listening to any of those because we decided months ago that this was Harden’s to lose because . . . well, because it was Harden’s to lose, just as we ceded the 2017 award to Russell Westbrook before New Year’s Day and the 2016 award to Stephen Curry around the same time.
This kind of rush-to-judgment pigheadedness robs the award of its own only true value – namely, the arguments. The whole idea behind the word “valuable” was to insure that nobody could create a universal definition for “value.”
But now the voting is handled by early shouting, and early basketball is less compelling than late basketball. So yes, I am saying that the award should be weighted at least ever so slightly toward how well you do in crunch time if only to keep it from being a fait accompli.
Now maybe it’s just been the nature of the last three winners that the lasting impressions were stamped early. Curry was on a team that won 73 games, including the first 24, and his numbers hold up against Harden’s on a .500 team and late qualifier. And Westbrook won because people fell in love with Oscar Robertson and his triple-double season for the first time in over a half-century despite the fact that Harden changed his game to make Houston better and answer the critics who said he wasn’t as pure and noble as Curry.
And now Harden has combined his last two seasons and merged them with Houston having the best record both early and late. Again, this is not to dispute Harden’s credentials as the guy who should win. I’d simply like Adam Silver to mind-control the people who pay attention to the game into not talking MVP until – oh, let’s say Valentine’s Day. At least then we’ll have a decent argument, which is the only reason any of these awards actually should exist at all.