The NBA's MVP Scramble and Living In Interesting Times

NBA history has clean lines. The degree to which one player can dominate a game and relative roster stability from season-to-season ensures that the league's 60-year index of Who Was Good repeats itself quite a bit. The 1960s are a long string of Wilt Chamberlain and Bill Russell MVPs and Celtics championships. Magic and Bird ran the '80s; only five franchises so much as made the NBA Finals during the decade. The Bulls defined the '90s to the point that everyone generally agrees the Rockets owe their pair of titles as much to Jordan's baseball sabbatical as Hakeem's magnificence.

There have been times, here and there, when a player got touched by Naismith's ghost and hit some previously unforeseen level for a single season. Fluke champions emerge, then immediately slink back into fringe contenderdom. Overall, though, the NBA's record books resemble climate logs more than daily weather reports, tracing the protracted arcs of the league's stars and powerhouses. This is why fans fight off fainting spells when they talk about Anthony Davis: we already know that, barring some struck-down-in-his-prime injury tragedy, the Brow is going to own the league eventually. NBA history will follow his path, to an extent. We're eager to see where he will take it, and when it will begin.

Davis's predictable ascendance aside, we're in the middle of a strange season. At its outset, nothing seemed inevitable: LeBron had switched teams; the Spurs are always skirting the line between death and fearsome, indestructible vitality; the Warriors were promising, but they hadn't achieved anything yet; and the only reason anyone was talking about the Hawks was due to their owner and general manager saying some racist stuff over the summer. When we look back on it in a couple decades, this year will likely represent the beginning of a trend that will have already played out; history tends to be a lot more legible after the fact. We're soaking in it right now, though, and the uncertainty is disorienting.

This fraughtness is borne out most prominently in the MVP race. What you would have figured seven months ago to be LeBron v. Durant, Part III: Who The Real MVP? has deteriorated into something considerably less coherent. This is a season of great players making unexpected developmental leaps. James Harden has perfected his if-a-junkball-pitcher-played-hoops brand of slash-and-kick while carrying a Dwight Howardless Rockets team. Russell Westbrook is waging bloody warfare on something/everything on every damn play. Steph Curry is so incandescently effective that he's sitting out half the Warriors' fourth quarters because the team's already up by 20. Davis can't be stopped by anything—not even a coach who seems to grasp basketball about as well as he does particle physics. And after a couple of noticeably un-springy months, LeBron is bathing the league in flame again. Somewhere in a large Oklahoma City abode, a lame but on-the-mend Kevin Durant is mumbling soon to himself as he downvotes YouTube clips of Curry draining consecutive 25-footers.

MVPs don't always go to the right player, nor do they perfectly indicate who mattered in a given era. Somehow, Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O'Neal have only one each. Steve Nash has two, which doesn't feel right. Dave Cowens won the honor back in 1973, presumably because sportswriters liked hanging out with him. It's a trophy that indicates who got the most votes in a contest that isn't particularly well-defined. The what in the hell does "most valuable" mean anyway? bar-room quandary has legs because it has no definitive answer, but it's inane because no one actually cares.

More than who wins this season's MVP, it should be remembered that there was, for the first time since the NBA entered the King James era circa 2008, a bona fide conversation about who should win that wasn't LeBron-centric. Derrick Rose got his award in 2010 because folks were punishing LeBron for fleeing to Miami, and Durant's triumph last year had at least a little bit to do with the (strange) idea that LeBron was "coasting." This is not to say that either player wasn't spectacular in those seasons, but to point out that MVP discussions tend to revolve around one—maybe two—epoch-defining talents who haunt the voting even if they don't come out on top. Karl Malone's first MVP was about Jordan fatigue. Any and all cases made in the mid-to-late '80s that Dominique Wilkins might be in line for the prize were for entertainment purposes only so long as Bird and Magic were at the peak of their powers.

As it stands, the 2015 race has five deserving candidates and the best player alive isn't the favorite. This sort of thing basically never happens. It's an indicator, not just of the breadth of staggering players in the NBA at this moment in its history, but that the league is in one of its rare transitional periods, where old orders are being juggled and new ones are still illegible. A genuinely interesting MVP debate reflects interesting times, and this one's a doozy. We'll look back at it someday, from wherever this present is leading us, and find it hard to believe.