great read.
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<DD>Noah Graham/NBAE via Getty Images
If Kobe Bryant and Kevin Durant look serious to you, that's probably because both of them know they're stuck in some seriously tight races for MVP and rookie of the year honors, respectively.
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Stein Line's Season-Ending Award Ballots
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By Marc Stein
ESPN.com
(
Archive)
It's the final Friday of the regular season ... and you know what that means.
One by one, we dribble through the season-ending award ballots that soon will be shipped back to the league office.
Ready?
Most Valuable Player
Kobe Bryant, Los Angeles Lakers
I thought the standings would help me decide. But they didn't.
I thought
Chris Paul having the best season of any point guard in a conference teeming with Hall of Fame-bound quarterbacks and leading his team to the best record in the West after 79 games -- while possibly saving basketball in New Orleans -- would be clinchers.
They weren't.
I thought I'd be voting for Paul after stacking all that up, but this voter simply can't deny Kobe his maiden MVP because the Lakers might finish a game or two or even three behind the Cinderella Hornets in the nine-team race of the century. I keep looking at Bryant's season and looking at Paul's, and yes, I'm still giving the edge to Kobe.
For all of Paul's undeniable brilliance -- and for all of you who can't wait to angrily dismiss this as a lifetime achievement award for the guy considered the best player to never win an MVP award -- I'm sorry. But Bryant has had to deal with and do more this season than even CP3.
Bryant has seen more double- and triple-teams and junk defenses. He's endured a far lower grade of overall team health;
Andrew Bynum will end up having played less than half the season, and
Pau Gasol has missed 11 games just since his Feb. 1 arrival in Los Angeles. Kobe has played through a hand injury of his own that still requires surgery and is asked by his coach and teammates to be All-NBA at both ends, all while shouldering higher expectations than those of any other player in the league.
Kobe certainly could have made this a lot easier if the Lakers hadn't suffered those unforgivable home losses to the Bobcats and Grizzlies in late March, giving New Orleans its huge opening to shock the world and secure the West's No. 1 overall seed. But I'm rescinding
my previous contention that the team with the better record would decide the Kobe-versus-Paul derby because the win-total difference won't be sufficiently drastic to separate these two. The variables mentioned above, to me, are bigger.
I know, I know. Now you're going to ask how I could vote for
Steve Nash two years running and not vote for Paul now. That complaint, for starters, has never made sense to me. Every season, and thus every MVP race, should be judged on its own. The specifics of every season are different, and so is the MVP field every season. Just look at this field: It's suddenly down to a two-man sprint after it seemed for so long that we had four potential MVPs (
LeBron James and his Cavaliers are sputtering to the finish, and
Kevin Garnett's culture-changing effect in Boston is unfairly, but unavoidably, taken for granted because of all the wildness out West).
If you insist on persisting with the Nash comparison, don't forget that the little Canadian won his back-to-back MVPs for almost single-handedly turning a 29-win team into a 62-win team that posted the
league's best record in a West that wasn't too shabby ... and then by keeping Phoenix at a 54-win level after it traded away
Joe Johnson and lost
Amare Stoudemire for most of the following season. Dragging Nash into this, in other words, doesn't really settle anything, because Paul season's doesn't precisely correspond to either blueprint. Dragging Nash into this actually supports Garnett's campaign more than Paul's.
Clear cut for Kobe? No one would dare say that. But I finally decided that Bryant has to be my MVP when he's playing the team ball of his life, for a club everyone fears in the playoffs far more than the Hornets, while he's also playing in a stratosphere that only LeBron can presently reach. At Stein Line HQ, all that adds up to No. 24.
STEIN'S BALLOT
1. Bryant
2. Paul
3. Garnett
4. James
5.
Manu Ginobili, San Antonio
October prediction: Garnett
