The most prestigious single award an NBA player can receive is the NBA Most Valuable Player Award. It is supposed to go to the BEST player in the league. It is not a team accomplishment award and it is not an award that goes to the player who happens to play on the best team. The award should go to a player who plays on a winning team but a prerequisite to winning the award should not be that the individual player that receives the award is on the team that wins the championship. It is an individual award given to the best player in the league over the course of an entire season. When I was writing my book “The G.O.A.T.: The Quest To Find The Best” I asked several of my friends what would be their #1 criteria for picking the Top 75 players of all time and ultimately the greatest of all time? Several, including my son, said they thought the most important criteria, if they had to choose just one, was the number of MVP’s the player had won. While I certainly think that is important and should be considered as one of the criteria, I don’t think it is the most important. MVP and other awards a player receives are only one of the ten criteria that I used to choose my top basketball players of all time. I based that decision on months of research on the voting of the MVP. It is, and has always been, a subjective award given to the one player that the players in the league voted on until the 1980-81 season. The sportswriters have chosen the league MVP since 1981. As an NBA fan for over 70 years I would like to think that the voters of this award would be free of bias, and cast their ballots with the utmost integrity. Unfortunately, as with other voting exercises, honesty and objectivity, are often missing from the process. There have been several years, since the award was first presented to Bob Pettit for the 1955-56 season that the award DID NOT go to the most valuable player. There have been some, at best, shenanigans and, at worst, dishonest and nefarious voting that has taken place over the years by the players AND the sportswriters. I retired from coaching in 2001 after 22 years. I coached in high school, junior college, and college so I have  first-hand knowledge of how sports awards are often won. I have been in rooms with coaches that voted for some unworthy player in order to “take away” the chances of a deserving player that might keep their player from getting the award or making an all-star team. I believe that is what took place among the NBA players in the early voting for the NBA MVP. I can’t know for sure what went on from 1956 until the sportswriters began voting but how could anyone explain some of the MVP award winners. It is not my intention to disparage any of the players who won the award. I am simply pointing out some discrepancies in the MVP awarding process. Also, I am not implying that any player willingly cheated on their ballot but they may have been “influenced” to vote for a particular player. The rules in the early days were very simple. A player had to have played 500 minutes or more (each team had 9 or 10 players that would have qualified), a player could not vote for himself or a teammate, and beginning in year 3 each player listed their top 3 choices. (1^st Place-5pts, 2nd Place-3pts, 3rd Place-1pt). A deserving player intentionally left off of 10 or 12 ballots would make it impossible to be the MVP recipient. There were only 8 or 9 teams in the league until 1966 so a team or two could influence the outcome. The sportswriters voted for the All-NBA Team and the players voted for the MVP. In 1956-57 Bob Cousy won the award and a player by the name of Mel Hutchins, who played for Ft. Wayne Pistons, averaged 12.3 points and 7.9 rebounds, received the eight votes for MVP. In that same 1956-57 season Kenny Sears of the New York Knicks, who averaged 14.8 points and 8.5 rebounds, tied Hutchins for the most MVP votes. (Neither player made the All-NBA Team.) The Knicks were 36-36 and the Pistons were 34-38 for the 1956-57 season. In the 1961-62 season, Wilt Chamberlain averaged a record-breaking 50.4 points, 25.7 rebounds, played 48.5 minutes a game, and was First Team All-NBA BUT finished 2^nd to Bill Russell for MVP. Russell was 2^nd team ALL-NBA that year. In 1963-64 Wilt averaged 36.9 points, 22.3 rebounds, led the league in minutes played, was 1^st Team All-NBA but finished second to Oscar Robertson in the MVP voting. In 1968-69 Wes Unseld won the MVP Award and the Rookie of the Year Award with a 13.8 points per game average and 18.2 rebounds. Elgin Baylor, who never won an MVP,  led the Lakers to the Western Conference Championship with a 24.6 points per game average and 10.6 rebounds per game finished fifth in the voting. (Willis Reed was 2^nd, Billy Cunningham 3^rd, Bill Russell 4^th) Wilt Chamberlain in spite of averaging 20 points and 21 rebounds on the Laker team with Baylor and West did not get a single MVP vote. I think we can draw a clear conclusion from all of this; the players and the sportswriters did not like Wilt Chamberlain!

There are other players that for inexplicable reasons never won an NBA MVP. I hear fans use the term “underrated” all of the time for a player that is maybe not recognized as highly as they think they should be. Sometimes that player is their favorite and actually is not as good as they think they are. But Elvin Hayes may be one of the most underrated players to ever play in the NBA. I have him #23 in my book, just ahead of George Mikan and behind Patrick Ewing. Elvin Hayes never finished above third in the voting for MVP even though in 1974-75 Hayes averaged 23 points, and 12.2 rebounds per game for the Washington Bullets. Bob McAdoo won the award and Dave Cowens finished second. Hayes finished his 16-year career as a 6x All-NBA pick, 12x All Star, a 21 points per game average and 12.5 redounds average. Rick Berry, who is the only player in basketball history to lead the ABA, NBA, and the NCAA in scoring, never won an MVP. A lot of NBA followers would argue that he was never the best of the best but just as many fans would argue that the reason Berry never was MVP is because the people voting did not like him because of his “in your face” attitude. The award or any award based on skill and achievement should never be about personality or popularity but too often it is. Berry finished second in the voting in 1969-70. He was 6x All-NBA, 12x All Star, and finished his 14 year career with a 24.8 point average. He is #31 on my Top 75 all-time list.

Since I first posted this in 2021  Nikola Jokic has won the award two consecutive years, 2021 and 2022.  Joel Embid won the award last year and was on his way to repeat but has not played in enough games. The NBA has FINALLY put some guidelines in place as far as the number of games a player must play to qualify for the award and for the All-NBA Team. (Sixty-five games is the minimum number of games a player must play in for the season.) The picture of Jabbar rebounding over Dr J was chosen because between these two legends of the game they have a combined 10 MVP’s is one of my favorites.