Give LeBron James Finals MVP

Somewhere in the beginning of the third quarter in Game 5 of this year’s NBA Finals, Jeff Van Gundy watched LeBron James muscle up a tough shot to force a foul and found himself saying, “After this game can we just give him the MVP of this series and get it over with?”

James would ultimately score 40 points as part of his second triple-double of the Finals to further prove Van Gundy’s point, but while he clearly was joking about giving LeBron the Finals MVP award early, he wasn’t joking about getting James that trophy in a general manner of speaking.

Whether the Cavaliers win or lose the Finals, LeBron has been the best player in the series by several metaphorical miles, which begs a somewhat outlandish yet reasonable question: should the media members voting this year follow tradition and simply choose the best player in the series from the winning team, or should they choose the basketball demigod who has given us one of the most dominant Finals performances of all time, even though he might have piloted the losing squad?

For the record, there’s no rule that says the NBA Finals MVP award can’t be given to a player on the losing time. In fact in 1969, the first time the NBA gave out the accolade, a player from the losing team actually was named Finals MVP.

That guy was Jerry West, who had a monster series in a memorable seven-game slug fest against the Celtics. Not only did he average 37.9 PPG, 7.4 APG and 4.7 RPG for the entire series, but he finished Game 7 with a massive triple-double, scoring 42 points to go along with 13 boards and 12 assists. The Lakers lost the game by two points despite West’s monolithic efforts.

The parallels between what West did in 1969 and what James is doing right now are rather stark. Through five games, James has scored 40 or more points three times, has averaged 36.6 PPG, 12.4 RPG and 8.8 APG and has posted a couple of triple doubles, all of which place him among the most dominant players in NBA Finals history, for either a winning or a losing team. James and West are the only players in NBA Finals history to post a triple-double with 40 points.

And if the stats aren’t convincing enough, another way to look at any sort of MVP vote is what a player means to his team. In other words, if we replaced one of Stephen Curry or Klay Thompson or Andre Iguodala with a mediocre replacement, would the Warriors still have had as much success in the Finals? Whatever the answer to that question may be for any of those three players, the Cavaliers would be in much worse shape without James than Golden State would be without any one of their best players. How, for example, might Curry have carried his team without Thompson or Iguodala, as James has done without Kyrie Irving and Kevin Love?

James has muscled his team into the Finals without his two strongest supporting characters and then made things competitive in the series when there really wasn’t any reason to believe they would be. He not only has been the best player in the Finals by a wide margin, he also has been the most valuable to his team. To give the Finals MVP trophy to, say, Iguodala would be an insult to the performance we all have witnessed through the first five games of this series. It’s hard to imagine Game 6 (or Game 7, if applicable) being any less impressive.

With the Cavaliers down 2-3 to the Warriors, it is starting to look as though Golden State will ultimately take the title. Should that happen though, it will be interesting to see whether James gets the Finals MVP trophy, especially if Game 6 is a loss at Cleveland. It would be easy (and somewhat fitting) to see fans there cheering on James as something of a consolation prize to the end of what surely has been an emotional and fun season for them. It won’t have been a title, but James will have gotten them as close as any human could have considering the situation.

More importantly, though, giving James the award is the correct choice. Now it’s just a matter of whether or not voters have the gumption to actually break tradition and give it to the Finals’ actual most valuable player.