Who's your M.V.P.?

With the NBA season ending last night, it is time to decide the recipient of the Most Valuable Player award. While I would like to give it to myself (you should see the game I kick at Kilroy's), I have been informed that this is the National Basketball Association MVP, so reluctantly I made another valuable choice. \nValuable? Nope. Try dominant. Who was the most dominant player on the floor this season? Who can play offense as well as they play defense? In my eyes, the MVP in a season IS the best player in that season.\nThe MVP award has nothing to do with team performance, but in considering the winner there should be some measure of success. When looking at qualities such as value and dominance there are some questions that need to be answered: Who has done the most with the least? Who has been the best with the worst? \nThis season there is one resounding answer to those questions. His name is Kobe Bryant.\nThere is a reason Kareem Abdul-Jabbar won the award six different seasons and that Bill Russell and Michael Jordan have both been MVPs five times each. They were the best players on the court in that year and, unlike this year's MVP, they were surrounded by some of the league's best talent on those teams. \nAbdul-Jabbar won an NBA Championship in two of the six years he was voted MVP. He never won both a MVP award and a championship after 1980. Jordan only had one season in which he won the MVP -- the 1987-88 season -- but failed to win an NBA Championship.. Russell is another example altogether. Those Boston Celtics teams reigned over the rest of the league like a monarchy. In Russell's 13 seasons with the Celtics he won 11 championships. \nOK, snap back to reality.\nThe 2005-06 Lakers are not your father's Celtics. Los Angeles stumbled into the seventh seed of the Western Conference for the playoffs. While the haters will say that this boxes out Bryant from the MVP race, I say that is what makes him the MVP. If not this year for Kobe, then when?\nDuring his career, he's been an athletic ringer and an accused rapist. He was a winner and a whiner. He was a dynasty disabler and a terrible teammate. But every single night, hands down, Bryant is the best player on any court in the country. \n"I'm not saying that he's the most valuable player, but he's certainly the best player," Phoenix Suns coach Mike D'Antoni told Sports Illustrated. "And it's not even close. He is utterly dominant." \nD'Antoni would hand the award to Bryant himself, if his bias didn't lie elsewhere. Suns guard Steve Nash, who won the MVP last season, has a decent shot at being chosen again this season. Nash leads the league in assists per game and total assists. Yet, while Nash has passed his way to the second best record in the Western Conference without center Amare Stoudemire, he has nonetheless done it with players like Shawn Marion, Raja Bell, Tim Thomas and Boris Diaw. \nOn offense, Cleveland Cavaliers guard LeBron James is unguardable. His play is so indescribable that I had to make up a word -- unguardable. But Bron-Bron needs to play both sides of the ball with equal effectiveness. He leads the NBA only in minutes played, but in the next few years, James will win a handful of MVP awards -- most of them unanimously. \nBryant, on the other hand, leads the league in points per game, total points, field goal attempts, field goals made and free throws made. He scored the second-most points in NBA history this year when he shot for 81 points against the Toronto Raptors on Jan. 22. He is the fifth player in NBA history to average 35 points per game.\nIt has been three decades since a player from a .500-level team was the league's MVP. The last to do that was Abdul-Jabbar, who won in the 1975-76 season even though his Los Angeles Lakers ended the season with a 40-42 record. As the Lakers sew up the seventh spot in the Western Conference -- a playoff appearance that would never have happened without Kobe -- they will be playing basketball in May squarely on the shoulders of their savior. \nSure, Kobe has been impressive this season. But, then again, I once brought home five girls from five different bars in the same night. So you tell me, who's the Most Valuable Player?