![]() ![]() There are dozens, all happening simultaneously, spreading and feeding into one another like wildfires.Įarlier this month, ESPN’s JJ Redick and Kendrick Perkins had a heated, on-air exchange about the MVP race and the demographics of the media members who vote for it. Weighing the regular season against the playoffs and the present moment against the full heft of history. Instead, every week of the MVP debate seems to tap directly into some hot-button topic that basketball fans already feel fervently about.Īnalytics. If this race were just a comparison of the top players in the league, it would look like it does most years: with some fairly mild disagreements, a few comments and retorts from the players involved, and some standard-issue, horse-race coverage on who’s trending up and who’s trending down. Antetokounmpo would be a perfectly worthy MVP, but in this case, he feels like the moderate candidate between radical (and confrontational) extremes. The worst of them seem to swirl around Embiid and Jokic-betting favorites and natural foils who play the same position in completely different ways. Yet here they are, along with Antetokounmpo, in the middle of it all-standing in for some worldview or another in all sorts of proxy battles. And for as much as Jokic doesn’t seem to care about the award, his case for a third straight MVP has become a crusade for so many other parties. For as much as Embiid wants to be the league’s MVP, he didn’t exactly sign up to be front and center in a debate about racial bias or the limitations of one-number metrics. Things have gotten pretty testy of late, to the point that the players involved have tried to back away from the discourse, and their coaches have made public pleas for a little civility. As the leading candidates for the NBA’s MVP award, Nikola Jokic, Joel Embiid, and Giannis Antetokounmpo are on a collision course-first in a string of heavyweight head-to-head matchups, and then as convenient champions in the many culture wars being waged around them. ![]()
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