Championships are about them, and awards are about us, because we need them to be. Leagues labor to make fans feel essential, and in a broader sense we are. The NBA wouldn’t exist if people didn’t care about it, but they could play the Finals on a neutral court in a hollowed mountain and it wouldn’t affect the outcome. Spectatorship is a disempowering experience, and though we invite that disempowerment we are also always on some level bristling against it: grousing on Twitter about a coach’s substitution patterns, shuddering as the clock ticks down in a close game, our chests swelling and sinking as a jumper spins off a guard’s fingertips. It’s painful how little sports need you. They pull you under, no matter how strong a swimmer you are.
So from beneath the surf, we try to figure out who should win the Most Valuable Player award. Not that we have any say in the matter, but this isn’t definitive in the way competitions are. The process isn’t sacred and the outcome can be rejected—see Malone over Jordan, Robinson over Shaq and Hakeem. It’s a game of opinions and emotions, one to which we’re well-suited. Opinionating and emoting is about all we’re good for.
James Harden is my MVP, and I’m not happy about it. He’s about as joyful and expressive as he’s ever been ensconced in the pacey swirl of Mike D’Antoni’s offense, but there is something about the way his body throws all offspeed pitches that doesn’t thrill me. He makes dominance seem like something you can attain via technicality, by figuring the game’s metaphysical rules out, all the mid-drive pauses that cause defenders to run up his back, the way he can dance and cross and go nowhere, how he creates only exactly as much space as he needs to get a glance at the rim. It’s fitting that efficiency heads would love him. There’s exceedingly little about what he does on the court that’s superfluous.
And yet beyond that difficult placidity, there’s perhaps the most well-rounded offensive game in the league. Shedding Dwight Howard and gaining a coach who values tempo and spacing has placed into relief the breadth of Harden’s talent. We saw most of it two seasons ago, but his shift from de facto to formal point guard has revealed a generousness about him that didn’t previously seem to exist. By having even more of the ball, he appears to have less of it, spreading it to Ryan Anderson and Eric Gordon on the wings and bouncing it into Clint Capella for dunks. The frustrating cleverness that gets Harden to the basket and the foul line reads as a kind of inwardness—a man alone in his head, making paper cranes—but when he uses the lanes he carves out with shimmies and feints to find the perfect spot to pass from, he’s sharing his brilliance with others, which they in turn, when they knock down the wide open shot, help us better understand.
Russell Westbrook is altogether more brutal and obvious. Along his ascent, Harden has vindicated D’Antoni and put the Rockets at the fringes of title contention, and Westbrook has been making exactly one point the entire season, which is that nothing has ever hurt him. It’s been five months and counting of rage, of drives that look like they might end with Russ plunging a fist through the backboard instead of shooting, of shameless and certain contested fourth quarter jumpers, of passes whipped to teammates with hand-shattering crispness. It’s been watching an exceedingly capable player push himself past his own capacity. The closest analogue isn’t Jordan or Kobe at the peak of vindictiveness—it’s Lil Wayne taking a long pull from a Vitamin Water bottle full of cough syrup and banking the day’s fifth track. It’s daring and wearying and unhinged.
Amidst the furious sprawl Westbrook has splayed this season is some of the most beautifully stubborn basketball you’ll ever see. Just this past Monday night, Russ beat the Mavericks more or less by himself, scoring 12 of the Thunder’s final 14 points, including a mid-range game-winner with seven seconds left. What made it quintessentially Russ-like is the way he charred Yogi Ferrell, shooting over him, shouldering him away, surging past him and throwing down a tomahawk slam. No one in the league besides swells in size the way Russ does when he’s hot. He’s not a problem-solver like Harden. You don’t try to take something away from him and his ingenious Plan B leaves you shaking your head. Russ becomes the problem. And there’s no fixing it. Only he can thwart himself at that point.
However authoritatively pitched the arguments for either player get, the choice is, as ever, about sensibilities—what we like and what we like to think of ourselves as liking. There’s no solving or quantifying this, really. Harden’s candidacy is the tent under which stat geeks and peculiar kinds of aesthetes congregate, and folks prone to deliriously unselfconscious all-caps fits, who come to basketball for the terrifying and awesome, tend to be Westbrook partisans. And hell, effortful student-of-the-game types have their Kawhi Leonard cases. What’s appealing about this, if you can get beyond the bromides of the rudimentary who-ya-got discussions that abound, is the democratic nature of it. I’m not terribly moved this year. I have a take, though not much conviction behind it. But it belongs to me, at least, and you have yours, and that’s about as much agency as sports afford us.
There’s a line at the end of Adaptation that I think about a lot. Nic Cage as Donald Kaufman is recounting a time in high school when he flirted with a girl he loved who laughed at him behind his back afterwards. He could hear her making fun of him but says he didn’t feel any shame because I loved Sarah… It was mine, that love. I owned it. Even Sarah didn’t have the right to take it away.
Sports don’t often give us what we want most. They provide ample entertainment, but we also watch our favorite teams and players age and decline and fail. There’s only one champion at the end of each season, and it’s usually not who we’d like them to be, and, anyway, we aren’t involved in the decision-making process. But MVP debates are somewhere to direct all this mostly useless worrying and vexing and thinking we do about sports. We get to create something personally meaningful out of it, shape our reasoning the way we’d like to, and it’s as valid as anyone else’s. No matter who actually wins the award once the journalists and commentators are done voting on it, our MVP is ours. No one has the right to take it away from us. We own it.
