dapurpman said:
This should OBVIOUSLY be Kobe's third MVP (to date, he officially has ZERO).
And as much as it might SEEM that I'm anti-MJ, in my opinion, HE deserved to win MVP TEN TIMES, not the mere five he collected - he lost to players like Karl Malone and Charles Barkley, who, while they were admittedly excellent players (I'd even go so far as to call Barkley (but NOT Malone) "great," there's no doubt in my mind that during ANY of those seasons, any GM in his right mind would have prefered to have started his team with MJ over anyone else in the universe, given the chance.
And THAT is what MVP should be about - not "Best Player On This Year's Best/Most En Vouge/Most Improved Team" (a la Malone and Barkley) and not "Most Likeable White Player, who helped his team become very good, when they used to be average (Steve Nash, each of the past two seasons).
Rather, MVP, should mean the same in Basketball that it does in economics and finance - that is:
If, hypothetocally, every single player became a free agent immediately, and you were the GM responsible for picking ONE player, and you were fortunate enough to get the number one pick in the wide-open-hypothetical-everyone-in-the-universe-is-eligible-draft . . . whom would you pick?
And in my opinion, if the answer to that question was anything other than "Michael Jordan" in any of the ten season's in which he was CLEARLY the league's most dominant player, and anything other than "Kobe Bryant" in any of the past three seasons (including this one), then you shouldn't be allowed to vote.
Because if you'd rather have Karl Malone in his prime over Michael Jordan in his prime, or Steve Nash of the past 2-plus years over Kobe Bryant over the past two-plus years, then you belong in a rubber room.