We're going to look back on "2007 NBA Most Valuable Player Dirk Nowitzki" and laugh. Hell, some of us were laughing before he even picked up his trophy.
Nowitzki, who wimped out of the playoffs and took Dallas down with him, as MVP of this NBA season is flat out wrong. It's criminal. Felonious.
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| Dirk tore it up in the regular season, but his back was turned in the playoffs. (Getty Images) |
Not Nowitzki. It's not his fault that he's a gutless fraud, a player with so much size and skill that the game comes easy to him right up to the point where the game gets hard. I'd call Nowitzki a bully, but he's not tough enough to be a bully. A bully would have taken the puny Golden State Warriors' lunch money, but Nowitzki hid behind Josh Howard, which is why the Mavericks became the first No. 1 seed to lose a best-of-7 playoff series to a No. 8 seed.
In the regular season Nowitzki averaged 24.6 points and shot 50.2 percent from the floor, and Dallas led the NBA with 67 victories. In the playoffs he averaged 19.7 ppg and shot 38.3 percent when Dallas lost in six games to the Warriors. And don't blame Nowitzki's deterioration on the chaotic style of the smaller, quicker Warriors. Do not go there. Nowitzki plays the same position as Utah's Carlos Boozer, who is pounding Golden State for 22 ppg and 14.7 rpg. Boozer has increased his production in the playoffs (from 20.9 ppg and 11.7 rpg in the regular season), which is what a true superstar does.
Nowitzki? He's a beauty contestant. Looks great, I'll give you that. But no substance.
Still, he's not the criminal here. He put up huge numbers for 82 games, and the Mavs won 67 of those games. So who do we blame for "Dirk Nowitzki, 2007 NBA MVP"?
Not the voters. It's not their fault they were sucked into Nowitzki's fraudulence, although in hindsight, which is all we have at the moment, Nowitzki already had been exposed in the 2006 NBA Finals as a withering daisy. Turn up the heat, and Nowitzki wilts. That's what happened last year against Miami, which harassed him into 22.8 ppg on 39-percent shooting to rally from a 2-0 deficit to win the title in six games. In that sixth game, in Dallas, Nowitzki scored two points in the fourth quarter of a 95-92 loss. MVP my ass.
So can we blame the voters? No, not really. They were only following the rules as set by the NBA ... and there's the criminal. The NBA wants to pick an MVP and announce his name shortly after the regular season is finished, which puts voters in a tough spot: In a sport where the playoffs last two months -- when the important games don't begin until May -- MVP voters have to decide the league's biggest individual honor based on all those meaningless games from November to April.
Asinine.
But the NBA isn't alone. Other sports are in a rush to hail their hero, and those other sports get embarrassed just as severely as the NBA has been humiliated by "2007 MVP Dirk Nowitzki."
In college football, the Heisman Trophy is awarded weeks before bowl games. You say the bowl is just one game? True, but it's one enormous game, often the BCS national championship. And in a sport with such a small sample size -- the regular season typically has just 11 or 12 games -- the most important game of the season gets marginalized by ESPN's premature ejaculation of the Heisman Trophy show.
This is how you get "2003 Heisman Trophy winner Jason White" in the same season when White looks like Reggie Ball in the Sugar Bowl against LSU.
This is how you get "2005 Heisman Trophy winner Reggie Bush" in the same season when Vince Young was historically dominant. Bush didn't embarrass himself or the Heisman Trophy in the Rose Bowl, but Young had 267 yards passing and 200 yards rushing in that same game to demonstrate, unequivocally, that he was the country's most dominant player. Good grief, in 2005 Vince Young was the most dominant player since Oklahoma State's Barry Sanders ran for 2,628 yards in 1988. Reggie Bush, 2005 Heisman Trophy winner? Ridiculous.
It happens in college basketball, too. At the upper-most level of that sport, March is the only month that matters. The best teams, and the best players, are going to play in the NCAA Tournament. And they're going to play up to six games in the tournament, which comes out to roughly 15 percent of the entire season. And yet the NCAA Tournament isn't a factor in the voting for national player of the year.
Every major award is decided in late February, which is how you get "2006 Co-Players of the Year Adam Morrison and J.J. Redick" when neither of them deserved it. That season Joakim Noah emerged in February as an All-America candidate. By March and into early April, Noah was clearly the best player in college basketball. But the voting was done so early that Noah wasn't even a consensus first-team All-American. College basketball historians will look back on the 2006 season and wonder what the hell we were thinking.
NBA historians will wonder the same thing about this 2006-07 NBA season, when a weak-kneed front-runner named Dirk Nowitzki was given an award that should have gone to Steve Nash or LeBron James.
