[Wall Street Journal] My NBA MVP Vote: No More Awards Shows!

another good article

https://www.wsj.com/articles/my-nba-mvp-vote-no-more-awards-shows-1492960285

My NBA MVP Vote: No More Awards Shows!
Why is a great sprint for basketball’s most valuable being cooled off for a TV ceremony in late June?

By
Jason Gay
Updated April 23, 2017 11:27 a.m. ET

The most hotly contested election on the planet isn’t in France, or Georgia’s 6th congressional district, but the vote for the NBA’s Most Valuable Player. Voting is closed, however, as pro basketball’s regular season is over, and everyone knows that’s where true value is found—amid the snoozy ambivalence of an overlong 82-game season, not in the current do-or-die heat of the playoffs. I’ve never understood why sports leagues don’t include postseason play in their MVP discussions. Wouldn’t it greatly disadvantage a player whose team doesn’t make the playoffs? Wouldn’t it favor a player who has a ho-hum regular season but a title-winning playoff run? Um…yes? What’s the problem?

In the past, basketball handed out its MVP amid the playoffs, which occasionally made for some intriguing drama, hurt feelings and revenge—in last year’s Finals, LeBron James played like a snubbed “Goodfellas” to Steph Curry’s “Dances With Wolves”—but we won’t know this year’s winner until after the Finals, on June 26, because the NBA has opted to give its biggest individual prize out at, good grief, its first-ever live awards show. Now I don’t have a super-strong opinion about who should be the MVP—I don’t vote (not out of moral courage—no one’s asked), but I’d be fine with James, or Oklahoma City’s Russell Westbrook, Houston’s James Harden, San Antonio’s Kawhi Leonard, or even Boston’s Isaiah Thomas, an electrifying, magnetic player despite being the height of a desk lamp. However, I do have a very pronounced feeling about awards shows, which is: stop. Please stop! All of them. In every career discipline.

Outside of the Golden Globes, which owes its popularity to the boozy Mos Eisley vibe inside the Beverly Hilton, there isn’t a single awards show that passes for even mediocre entertainment—the rest are stiffly choreographed industry backslaps in which your only prayer is that something goes radically off-script (this year’s Oscars, bless them, delivered. Sorry, Warren.) Sports, in particular, has never been able to figure out an awards show—waiting patiently for someone to open an envelope is an awkward ask for athletes, and they never appear comfortable. The NFL has an awards show the night before the Super Bowl, and in fairness, it’s amusing to watch linemen wonder how long they have to sit stuffed in a chair before they can bail and go swallow the vodka luge at the Maxim party. The most famous sports awards show on the planet is FIFA’s Ballon d’Or, which looks like a junior high school detention produced by Andrew Lloyd Webber—the sole hope is that Cristiano Ronaldo will show up in a centaur costume—and of course there’s the ESPN ESPYs, which are as much fun as standing in a barrel of dead cod.

And yet the award shows keep on coming, because they can lure enough of an audience that TV will pay. Basketball must have wondered why it was giving its prizes away for free, when it could instead force everyone to dress up in a scratchy tuxedo, hire a comic, stretch a ceremony out over a couple of hours, and have a TV partner shell out for the privilege. The result is the answer to a question never asked. How were we living in a world in which Defensive Player of the Year wasn’t revealed via envelope in prime time? I’d argue it’s a tad cruel to make the NBA’s best show up at the start of their summer vacation and potentially watch a bitter rival win, especially when 29 of 30 NBA rosters have already not won the Finals. And yet this is part of the sell, too: you can already hear the production truck salivating at a potential close-up of a losing Harden or Westbrook, soul-crushed in a sheer Balmain blazer. If I were an adviser to either player, I’d say: Dude, go enjoy yourself in Hawaii. If you lose, everyone’s going to want to see your face and pound you on sports radio that you exhibited a shred of human disappointment. And even if you win, you’re still in humid New York City in late June, when you could be in…Hawaii.

Not every human action has to be packaged into middling television! And the pros don’t have to play along. It has warmed my scarred skeptic’s heart to see a few college football stars begin to cool on the ritual of showing up to the NFL Draft—this year’s presumed No. 1 pick, Myles Garrett, doesn’t plan to be Philadelphia for ESPN’s ginormous Draft Explosion on Thursday night, which would be the second time in three years the top pick wasn’t on hand to bear hug commissioner Roger Goodell. As soon as the NFL permitted TV to spin subplots of humiliation—remember those dark nights for passed-over picks like Aaron Rodgers and Brady Quinn—you knew this karmic payback was coming. Instead Garrett will be in Texas, with his loved ones and—get this—his own TV deal in partnership with the NFL Player’s Association to live stream his selection. As The Undefeated writer (and former NFL player) Domonique Foxworth noted the other day, the NFLPA’s TV plans are at odds with the NFL’s, and this is a way for Garrett make a little money, as opposed to being an unpaid actor at the NFL’s bacchanalia. He’ll do a show within a show! How’s that for some delicious disruption?

As for the NBA MVP, here’s the bottom line: basketball is taking its most interesting race in years, wrapping it in tin foil and sticking it in the fridge next to the frozen peas (and hope the result remains secret—sports writers are blabby, and the exit polls have begun apace.) Wouldn’t it be far more compelling to find out today? Basketball is one of the rare, great sports where the MVP favorites may literally go mano a mano. Harden and Westbrook are on the court ripping each other’s guts out right now! Besides, this year’s MVP debate is already overdiscussed to the point of exhaustion—if I hear even a whisper of conversation about the relative merits of Westbrook or Harden, or a vigorous counter-case for Leonard, James, or Curry, I quietly lift the nearest window, and jump. That it’s being dragged out until the last week of June only makes it more unctuous. Here is all you need to know about the value of awards ceremonies: Bob Dylan blew off the ceremony to get his Nobel. Now that is what I call an MVP.

Write to Jason Gay at Jason.Gay@wsj.com

Appeared in the Apr. 24, 2017, print edition as 'A Vote for No More Awards Shows.'​