Programming note: Watch Steph Curry's MVP press conference today at 2pm on CSN Bay Area, and streaming live right here.
PORTLAND -- The electorate never fails to disappoint, even when they all do the right thing.
Stephen Curry’s unanimous selection as the National Basketball Association’s MVP is nearly as stunning a development as his 17-point overtime performance Monday night against the Portland Trail Blazers.
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[RATTO: Curry breaks spirit of Blazers, reconfigures legend in process]
To get 131 people, all of whom are sure they know basketball in a way that no other living human can, to agree on anything is remarkable enough. To get them to ignore regional biases, the curvature of the earth and the desire for cheap Internet notoriety to do the obvious thing is even more jaw-slackening.
So yes, Monday’s column setting up the field for the few other players who could get a first-place vote is now mooted and invalidated, with a massive bootprint and a gob of spit. Hurray conformity! Down with idiosyncratic narcissism.
I am a failure, hear me roar.
Golden State Warriors
Curry’s selection, in which he more than doubled the voting totals of Kawhi Leonard, LeBron James and Russell Westbrook, spoke to everything we already know about his season and how he trumped even all that in Monday’s 132-125 win over the very game but under-Curried Blazers.
But none of the voters could know that when they voted, because the ballots are required by the end of the regular season, and barring some totally unnecessary bit of ballot box fraud, everyone involved did the sensible, defensible and logical thing. Everyone. Every. One.
Hardly seems fair.
But the hive mind apparently learns to obey its master when its master does what Curry did in 2015-16. The raw numbers are easy to find – it’s the psychological damage he does to opponents that is most noteworthy. When he yelled Monday night, “I’m back!” he was acknowledging this basic truth, that his mere presence puts people on their heels and rocks back their heads, and once he gets up to speed, they land flush on their backs, like penguins looking at planes flying overhead.
Draymond Green picked up a couple of second place votes in finishing seventh in the voting, from John Denton of OrlandoMagic.com and TNT’s Mike Fratello, but that’s of little interest except to note that they weren’t homer votes. Indeed, the balloting was as according-to-Hoyle as these things ever get. Whatever local issues could crop up were subsumed in the overall Curry mania.
In short, Stephen Curry has not only broken basketball as we know it, he has broken basketball voting as we know it. I’m not sure what the next frontier for him is after this, but Adam Silver would do well to watch his ass, just in case Curry gets an itch to hobnob with billionaires on a more regular basis.