Hard Work Pays Off: LeBron James Wins His First NBA MVP

Hello friends wordentertainmen, on this occasion the admin wants to share an article entitled Hard Work Pays Off: LeBron James Wins His First NBA MVP, we have made good, quality and useful articles for you to read and take information in. hopefully the post content is about Dwyane Wade, Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, which we write you can understand. Alright, happy reading.
LeBron James has won the 2009 NBA MVP, receiving 109 of a possible 121 first place votes to easily outdistance 2008 MVP Kobe Bryant and 2009 scoring champion Dwyane Wade. James received 1172 out of a possible 1210 points, while Bryant had 698 points (including two first place votes) and Wade had 680 points (including seven first place votes). Dwight Howard (328 points, one first place vote) and Chris Paul (192 points, two first place votes) placed fourth and fifth respectively; no other players received a first place vote or tallied more than 33 points.

James is a rare person who has actually not only met but exceeded all of the hype surrounding him. Cleveland Cavaliers assistant coach Chris Jent says that many people "just see the fantastic plays and his God-given ability. They don't understand that there were kinks in the armor and he wanted to figure them out. He wanted to straighten them out and he wanted to be better and the only way to do it is by working. When things are going good he works and when things are going bad he works harder." In the past few years, I have mentioned those "kinks in the armor"--defense, free throw shooting, midrange shooting, three point shooting--in various articles and maintained that Kobe Bryant was the best player in the NBA because he had no skill set weaknesses; that led some misinformed people to suggest that I harbor some kind of bias toward Bryant but James understood better than anyone that he needed to work on his weaknesses and he has pretty much eliminated every one of them (his midrange game still needs some work). James' improvement and the fact that he led the Cavs to the best record in the NBA convinced me that he deserved to win this year's MVP.

At 24 years, 106 days old, James is the youngest NBA MVP since Moses Malone, who was 24 years, 16 days old in 1979 when he won the first of his three MVPs. Wes Unseld remains the youngest NBA MVP ever, capturing the honor as a 23 year old rookie in 1969. Spencer Haywood (20, 1969) and Artis Gilmore (22, 1972) are the two youngest MVPs in ABA/NBA history; they both won the award as rookies in the ABA. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (23, 1971--NBA), Bob McAdoo (23, 1975--NBA), Wilt Chamberlain (23, 1960--NBA, rookie) and Bob Pettit (23, 1956--NBA) are the only other players in ABA/NBA history who won an MVP prior to turning 24 (several other players won MVPs in the year that they turned 24, including Julius Erving in 1974 in the ABA and Abdul-Jabbar in 1972 in the NBA).

Although this year the MVP voters managed to select the correct top five players in the proper order, when one delves into the vote totals some oddities emerge: one voter completely left Bryant off of his ballot and two voters left Wade completely off of their ballots, meaning that these voters did not rank Bryant and Wade respectively among the top five MVP contenders. Eight voters placed Bryant fourth and two voters selected him fifth. I consider James and Bryant to be in a class by themselves at the moment: no one other than Wade matches them from a skill set standpoint and James and Bryant enjoy a size advantage over Wade. Therefore, it is hard for me to understand how someone can place Bryant lower than second, let alone leave him off of the ballot entirely. Similarly, Wade's individual excellence this year should have earned him a top five vote on every ballot.


That's the article: Hard Work Pays Off: LeBron James Wins His First NBA MVP
Thank you for visiting my blog, hopefully it can be useful for all of you. Don't forget to share this article with your friends so they also know the interesting info, see you in other article posts.

You are now reading the article Hard Work Pays Off: LeBron James Wins His First NBA MVP with link address https://wordentertainmen.blogspot.com/2009/05/hard-work-pays-off-lebron-james-wins.html

More Articles

Post a Comment

Previous Post Next Post