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Who's the NBA's MVP?
LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Kobe Bryant are in a scintillating race only one can win
By JONATHAN FEIGEN
April 2, 2009
LOS ANGELES — Shaquille O’Neal stumbled into a condition he did not recognize. He was stumped.
He had seen everything he needed to see... Kobe Bryant, Dwyane Wade and LeBron James. He has watched more of their games than he ever thought he would. He has played with Wade and Bryant. He has been an MVP himself and had a two-time MVP, Steve Nash, for a teammate.
O’Neal was given a simple, direct question that has filled locker rooms, barrooms and chat rooms for weeks: Who is the NBA’s Most Valuable Player?
He had no idea.
“This year I can say it’s very close,” said O’Neal, unable to pick a preference. “Those three are playing above everybody else.
“This is the closest it’s been in a while. Last year, Kobe was a little bit better than everybody. He deserved it. This year is hard. I’ve got young boys now who really like those three, so I watch a lot of games. I watch those guys. It’s hard. I feel for (the media voters). But this year, you can’t go wrong.”
That’s one way to look at it. But to others, who would argue their favorite’s credentials offer irrefutable evidence that one player is unquestionably most worthy, voters cannot go right.
Bryant, James and Wade, members of a different sort of Big Three, have each built an unusually strong case that would seem to have everything — except something separating himself from the others.
“It’s too close to call,” said Rockets forward Shane Battier, who has matched up with all three. “Brent (Barry) and I were having the conversation, have there ever been co-MVPs? If (commissioner) David Stern wanted to show that he wants to be progressive, he could give co-MVPs.”
The NBA provides no guidelines to the 123 media members who vote, no criteria to weigh. The 27 different winners since the MVP was instituted for the 1955-56 season do not offer a guide. Value seems to be a consideration but not always the primary qualification.
“A couple times, I got snuffed,” O’Neal said. “I’ve come to the conclusion I don’t really know what the criteria is.”
Delayed candidacy
With his spectacular play since the All-Star break, Wade has moved into what appeared to be a two-man race. He has carried the Heat from the league’s worst record last season to fifth place in the Eastern Conference, often sharing the court with first- and second-year players.
Since the break, Wade has averaged 33.5 points (making 51.5 percent of his shots), 8.5 assists, 5.1 rebounds and 2.7 steals. He has led the Heat in scoring 66 times this season. He even has blocked shots in the last minute or in overtime to key eight wins.
Yet for all Wade has done, his team does not seem to be the sort that earns its star an MVP. In the past 26 years (excluding the 50-game lockout season), every MVP’s team has won at least 50 games.
“I think it’s between LeBron and Kobe,” Battier said. “Dwyane is probably the MIP, most important player. MVP is too close to call, but I think when you consider the season, it’s between LeBron and Kobe.”
The Lakers, who return home to play the Rockets tonight, are two games behind the Cavaliers in the race for the NBA’s best record. But they have beaten Cleveland in both meetings this season — giving the Cavs their only home loss — and also swept the series against the reigning champion Celtics.
Bryant, the 2007-08 MVP, has averaged 27.3 points, 5.4 rebounds and 4.9 assists.
West vs. East
“I think it’s Kobe,” Rockets center Yao Ming said without hesitation. “He is in the Western Conference. I think that takes more. If the Lakers were in the East, they’d probably win 70 games.”
James, however, has led Cleveland to the league’s best record, including a 25-4 record against the West. He is the only player in the NBA averaging at least 28 points, seven rebounds, and seven assists and is on pace to lead his team in points, rebounds, assists, steals and blocks, something only Kevin Garnett, Scottie Pippen and Dave Cowens have done.
Pippen, however, never won the MVP, and Cowens and Garnett did not win in the seasons they accomplished that rare feat.
“Kobe is an assassin,” O’Neal said. “He’s the type who can put all kinds of points in the bag and pull out 50. LeBron is the ultimate player: can get his, get everyone else involved, a great team player. D-Wade is a mixture of both. He can get his when he wants to but also keep everyone else involved.
“This year is hard. I can’t really say who deserves it.”
And the debate continues.
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Hansbrough nears the ultimate prize after stellar run at UNC
By Steve Wieberg
April 3, 2009
DETROIT — The skeptics among the scouts will nit and they will pick, and they'll tell you why Tyler Hansbrough is carrying a question mark into this year's NBA draft.
He's big, just not big enough. He's skilled but not athletically gifted enough. He's tough, a relentless competitor, the kind of character guy every coach covets. But — lest you missed their meeting in the NCAA tournament's South Regional final last weekend — he's not Blake Griffin, Oklahoma's No. 1 pick-in-waiting.
College basketball nonetheless will find another Griffin, just as it found another Michael Beasley this season and, a year ago, it discovered another Kevin Durant. Stars regenerate.
Hansbroughs come along less often.
Depending on how he and North Carolina fare in Saturday's NCAA semifinal against Villanova, the Tar Heels' All-America power forward has reached the final one or two games of a noteworthy college career. Choose the stat that impresses you most: leading all-time scorer in the talent-rich Atlantic Coast Conference, 13th-highest scorer in men's major-college history (with 12th-place Larry Bird in his sights), potentially the first three-time consensus All-American in nearly a quarter-century.
Or this: Hansbrough gave Carolina, and the college game, a signature face and name for four years.
"He's a throwback," says C.M. Newton, a Hall of Fame former coach, athletics director and chairman of the NCAA's men's basketball committee who hasn't met Hansbrough but became an admirer.
"None of us can take exception when a guy chooses not to go to college and goes for the dollars right out of high school or leaves early. We don't question it in other professions, so I don't think we have that right in basketball. But it's a healthy thing … a player like this."
Carolina coach Roy Williams puts it in more dramatic terms.
"I've said all year long, from last June to today, that every college coach in America should want Tyler Hansbrough to have a great year so people or agents or runners or somebody won't say, 'Well, you'd better jump out while it's hot. You never can tell what's going to happen,' " he says. "This kid chose to come back to college because he loved college basketball, loved college life. He's done very well.
"The NBA has not folded. He'll still be a No. 1 NBA draft choice."
Hansbrough is the nearest thing in his sport to football's Tim Tebow, who won the Heisman Trophy as a sophomore, was third in the voting as a junior and will return next season to quarterback Florida as a senior. Tebow, though, is a demigod, revered almost universally for the uniqueness of his talent, fiery leadership and missionary's morals.
Hansbrough has his own fresh-scrubbed looks and image. But the 6-9, 250-pound senior has drawn fury outside Chapel Hill, N.C., for his physical play, fed by an intense inner fire that drew the nickname "Psycho T." Opponents chafe at the number of times — nearly nine a game over his 140-game career — referees have sent him to the foul line.
Besides that, Tebow has helped win a national title.
Hansbrough hasn't — teammate Ty Lawson calls it "the last thing on his checklist" — and is getting his final shot at Detroit's Ford Field.
He stops short of calling it a hole in his résumé. But Hansbrough allows, "Who wouldn't want that on their checklist? … It'd be nice to have it."
Dream lives on despite bumps
Hansbrough and North Carolina played into the NCAA's Final Four a year ago. He was the star attraction, a 22.6-point scorer, 10.2-a-game rebounder and the national player of the year as a junior. But the Tar Heels didn't survive the tournament semifinals.
They fell into an unfathomable 40-12 hole in the first half of their semifinal against Kansas and ultimately lost 84-66. Expectations that they'd not only get back to the Final Four but win it all, maybe sweep through this season undefeated, grew as Hansbrough, Lawson and the rest of Carolina's array of standouts weighed and passed on jumps to the NBA.
The Heels played through injuries, most notably the loss of top defender Marcus Ginyard for virtually the entire season, and a 0-2 start in the ACC. They didn't survive the ACC tournament semifinals.
But nobody in the first four rounds of the NCAA tournament — from Radford to LSU to Gonzaga to Oklahoma — has come closer to them than 12 points.
"I think a lot of people would say, 'Wow, it must be great to go to Carolina. Must be easy. You win all the time,' " Villanova coach Jay Wright says. "But it's not. It's tough. They handle it; their players and coaches handle it extremely well. It amazes me. And I think the injuries … really strengthened them and made them great right now.
"They lost some games, but they know there's a reason they lost the games. It wasn't that they weren't good enough. They were missing players. So you take the humility and a loss and you learn to work harder."
'Nova got here with defense and grit — and not nearly as many future pros — and probably will throw 6-8 Dante Cunningham and 6-7 Shane Clark at the bigger Hansbrough. "It's always exciting," Clark says, "to go up against those types of players."
Star of a lesser magnitude
Hansbrough became the first national player of the year to return to school since LSU's Shaquille O'Neal in 1991-92. And improbably, his profile dimmed.
His scoring dipped to 20.9 points a game, his rebounding average to 8.1. Hardly an embarrassment. But Hansbrough wasn't the ACC player of the year, and he didn't finish second. He was third, receiving fewer than half as many votes (13) as Lawson, the junior point guard with electric speed (31), and runner-up Toney Douglas, a guard for Florida State (27). Hansbrough scored first-team All-America honors from the Associated Press this week, however.
"Some players on our team are stepping up and playing real well right now. I think Ty's playing really well," Hansbrough says. "If we're winning ballgames, I'll definitely take a back seat."
He did, to a degree, last Sunday against Oklahoma and Griffin, his successor as national player of the year. Hansbrough took a single shot in the second half, just four in the game, and finished with eight points and six rebounds. Williams raved about his second-half defense and willingness to defer on offense.
"That's the way he is," he says. "He's interested in his team winning."
Griffin was typically spectacular, going scoreless for the first 111⁄2 minutes before finishing with 23 points and 16 rebounds. But North Carolina (32-4) overran the Sooners 72-60 to advance to this weekend and Detroit.
P.J. Carlesimo, who took Seton Hall to the NCAA championship game in 1989 and since has coached four NBA teams, most recently the Oklahoma City Thunder before being fired this season, worked the South Regional games in Memphis as a radio analyst — and liked what he saw of both big men.
Griffin needs no affirmation.
As for Hansbrough, "You don't accomplish what he's accomplished, where he's accomplished it, for four years and not have a chance to be a very good NBA player," Carlesimo says. "I think anybody who dismisses him quickly, which I've heard some people do, is crazy. … He's a first-class winner, a first-class person. And I think he's going to be a very, very good NBA player."
Projections of where Hansbrough might go in the June draft run the gamut, most relegating him to the bottom half of the 30-pick first round. Wherever it is, Carlesimo predicts it'll be a pick and then money well spent.
What has endeared Hansbrough to North Carolina and college basketball will endear him to his pro destination. "As soon as his coaches say, 'Tyler, this is what we're going to work on,' I guarantee he's going to work on it," Carlesimo says. "And I'll guarantee that when he leaves at the end of the year and he comes back three months later, he'll come back like a (Michael) Jordan or a (Tim) Duncan would do. He'll add to his skill set.
"You're going to get it all, and you're also going to get whatever else is in there."
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Exiled by NCAA, Sampson on track to NBA head coach
By Chris Jenkins
April 3. 2009
MILWAUKEE — Kelvin Sampson still gets a thrill from watching the NCAA tournament, even though he knows he'll probably never be part of it again.
Sampson beams when he talks about the success of Villanova guard Scottie Reynolds, a player he originally recruited to Oklahoma. He's happy to see his friends in coaching keep winning.
But given the fallout from Sampson's messy exit from Indiana University, he has accepted the idea that his exile from college basketball probably is permanent. So as he winds up his first year as an assistant to Milwaukee Bucks coach Scott Skiles, Sampson has a new goal in mind: To become a head coach in the NBA.
"You never say never," Sampson told The Associated Press, when asked about a potential return to college. "But I'm really excited about the NBA, and I'm excited about the possibility of becoming a head coach in the NBA one day, maybe. And if it works out, it works out. If it does, it does. If it doesn't, it doesn't. But just being here with the Bucks, being part of this rebuilding, is exciting for me."
Sampson joined Skiles' staff in May, less than three months after resigning as the Hoosiers coach and accepting a $750,000 buyout after an NCAA report charged him with five major NCAA rules violations.
Other coaches have rebounded from NCAA violations and resurfaced, although Sampson's future is complicated by strict NCAA penalties that essentially prevent him from coaching in college until 2013.
Sampson is appealing the NCAA's ruling, but is otherwise trying to move past his tumultuous departure from the Hoosiers.
"I don't talk about that," he said. "It's in the past."
But Sampson does admit to some lingering regrets about a decision he made earlier in his career, when he left Oklahoma for Indiana in 2006.
In the course of a discussion about Reynolds, who went to Villanova after Sampson left Oklahoma for Indiana, Sampson said he worried about abandoning recruits who signed with him to play for the Sooners.
"When I left Oklahoma, I felt really guilty," Sampson said. "It was really emotional leaving the kids that you signed. You know that they signed to go play for you. And then when I left, they left -- and nobody wins in that deal. Oklahoma, those kids, in hindsight, you wish they had stayed at Oklahoma. But they chose to go somewhere else, and I'm just so thankful and so grateful. And I prayed, I prayed, that those guys would have great careers. And they have."
None more than Reynolds, whose success in the tournament has reminded Sampson of what he's missing.
"I had a lot of mixed emotions watching the tournament," he said. "I was fortunate to be in it for 14 years. But it's always exciting. I saw a lot of great games. I still have a lot of good friends who are coaching and it's always good to pull for them."
But Sampson also is learning to love life in the pros. And the more he learns, the more he sees the NBA as his permanent home.
Coming into this season, Sampson expected to find players who fit the NBA stereotype: Highly paid divas who don't listen to coaches. But Sampson says his real-world experience with Bucks players such as Charlie Villanueva, Charlie Bell and Richard Jefferson has been the opposite.
"The thing that's surprised me is how receptive players have been to coaching," Sampson said. "You know, you hear about things, but from Charlie to Charlie to Richard, everybody -- everybody on this team is coachable, and I think that says a lot about the organization and the kind of guys they have in here."
Sampson also has learned from Skiles, particularly the nuances of identifying and taking advantage of mismatches.
"The one thing the NBA does a great job of is taking advantage of mismatches," Sampson said. "You know, Scott's really good at figuring out where our mismatch is, and we have set plays, a sequence of set plays that we can call to take advantage of a mismatch at any time. That's something that (if) I become a head coach, I can utilize that -- something I don't know that I've ever really done a good job of in the past. I've coached against guys in college who did a good job of that, but it's something I can be better at."
Sampson is under contract with the Bucks for next season and expects to be back. With injured stars Michael Redd and Andrew Bogut returning to the court, he thinks the Bucks can have success.
"I enjoy being in Milwaukee, I enjoy the NBA," Sampson said. "It's a little bit of a novelty for me, and it's nice to see another coach do it a different way. I've been a head coach for 25 years, and I really haven't seen how any other coach does it. I've done it my way for a long time, and I've learned a lot this year."
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