The MVP Race
Posted on January 20th, 2007 by
Two-time reigning MVP Steve Nash.
His good buddy Dirk Nowitzki.
And the otherworldly Kobe Bryant.
Your regular-season Most Valuable Player can only be one of the above.
I was actually leaning toward saying it’s already down to a two-man race between the perpetually inseparable Nash and Nowitzki and was even encouraged to do so by Kobe when he visited Dallas on Thursday night. But rest assured Bryant can still intervene here. With the Lakers on a remarkable 53-29 pace entering the weekend in spite of injuries to Lamar Odom and Kwame Brown, and with Odom and Brown due back reasonably soon, No. 24 will be an undeniable factor in MVP balloting as long as the Lakers uphold their current success rate and finish with a win total in the 50s.
Otherwise …
Regular readers know that team success is always the foundation of our MVP deliberations, with at least 50 W’s required to crack the conversation. (Unless you play in the modern-day East, which means you’d probably need at least 55 wins and a few of those unforgettable walk-off triples that Arenas keeps giving us.)
Since only two teams in the league have established 60-win paces, we naturally gravitate toward the two guys driving those teams.
Nash. Nowitzki.
Nowitzki. Nash.
Kobe, for his part, says it’s Dirk if the season ended today. Nash echoed that sentiment after the Suns’ morning shootaround Friday, saying: “Dirk gets my vote. Again.”
No argument here, either. The Mavs have the league’s best record at the midpoint and Nowitzki is better than ever, operating at his usual high level of offensive efficiency but now regularly sprinkling in game-winning shots and monster fourth quarters in the wake of his NBA Finals heartbreak in June. Seventeen points in the final period and overtime last week in Indiana. Twelve points in the fourth at Toronto to cap Dallas’ big rally. Fourteen points in the fourth against Houston earlier this week, after Tracy McGrady did the early dazzling with 29 points by halftime.
Nowitzki is one of the few elite-level players who, even after eight seasons, shows up for season No. 9 having noticeably improved his game. He’ll never get the credit Nash gets for making others better, because he’s not a distributor, but another big Mavs progress-maker — Josh Howard — would say otherwise.
The ultimate proof? Dallas awoke Friday morning with a 5½-game lead over its longtime rivals to the south in San Antonio, with Nowitzki fueling the Mavs’ 33-4 response to their 0-4 start. It’s a stunning gap which must feel twice as big to Tim Duncan’s Spurs, given how close these teams usually are.
Nash, meanwhile, is arguably playing better than he did in his back-to-back MVP seasons, something you undoubtedly hear now on a nightly basis on the highlight shows. The fact that he has two Maurice Podoloff trophies at home is bound to hurt him with some voters, crazy as that sounds, because resistance to the idea that Nash belongs in the three-in-a-row pantheon with Bill Russell, Wilt Chamberlain and Larry Bird began to bubble early in some corners. Yet that shortsighted view overlooks two key truths.
1. You can only judge Nash against the competition of the day, based on the season in progress.
2. The alleged “help” he gets from Mike D’Antoni’s system doesn’t make all those shots go in — 53 percent from the field, 50 percent on 3s and 88 percent from the line in averaging 19.6 points and 11.4 assists — and doesn’t come close to measuring his leadership impact, which is borderline immeasurable these days. The Suns’ ability to reintegrate Amare Stoudemire alongside Shawn Marion and Boris Diaw so seamlessly, after playing so differently for a season without him, wouldn’t have a chance of working if Phoenix didn’t have special chemistry. You don’t need more than one guess to know where that chemistry starts.
Yet Nash, not surprisingly, doesn’t even want to field an MVP question or debate the respective cases out there.
“I don’t want to disrespect the award, because I cherish everything that’s happened to me,” Nash said. “But all I want to do [now] is win a championship.”
Two and a half seasons of this MVP stuff and he still doesn’t get it. The masses, Nashy, don’t even want to wait until January to start arguing. #
I may be a little biased here (since Steve Nash is one of my favourite players, and the Phoenix Suns are my favourite team) but my vote goes to Steve Nash for a triple peat!
