Major NBA change forthcoming?
All signs point to the league office renaming its regular-season MVP award in honor of someone new. Weigh in with your suggestions here
The NBA announced this week that the team that posts the best regular-season record, effective immediately, will scoop up the new Maurice Podoloff Trophy named in honor of the league's first commissioner.
Here's how it looks:
Yet that's just a fraction of the news here. The original Maurice Podoloff Trophy, remember, was the league's MVP trophy ... until that Podoloff Trophy was quietly shelved last season when the NBA handed out its foremost individual award for the regular season.
You see where this is going?
The NBA is giving us some very loud hints that it is about to name its MVP award after someone else.
But who?
Michael Jordan?
David Stern?
No major NBA prize, amazingly, has yet been named in honor of His Airness or Easy Dave.
Mystery legend No. 3?
The NBA Finals MVP trophy, remember, already bears Bill Russell's name.
The All-Star Finals MVP trophy already bears Kobe Bryant's.
An esteemed Substacker named Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is yet another all-time great whose name would fit rather nicely on a trophy he won a record six times — especially during a season when he is just 886 points away from ceding the league’s all-time scoring lead to LeBron James — except we can’t forget that the NBA created its Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Social Justice Champion Award just two seasons ago.
Stay tuned.
It's clear that a significant change is forthcoming here ... even if we can't specifically pinpoint it yet.
We probably should have started making more of a fuss about this in the spring, when Denver's Nikola Jokić received a crystal ball in May in his native Serbia when he won his second consecutive MVP trophy.
You'll recall that, after the 2020-21 season, Jokic hoisted a Podoloff.
Let's put it to the people in poll fashion:
The league has been updating the look of several trophies in recent months, including its remade Larry O'Brien Trophy handed to the Golden State Warriors in June after they won their fourth championship in eight years. The golden ball that famously sits atop The Larry O'Brien tilts in a different direction now than it did previously and is perched on a rounded base rather than the old square base.
Other recent changes include naming the respective Eastern and Western Conference championship trophies in honor of Bob Cousy and Oscar Robertson and creating East and West Finals MVP awards named for Larry Bird and Magic Johnson.
There must be a corporate group at the NBA that does award rebrands, and now we’ll just have continuous rebrands so they can justify their existence. Kinda like when a company gets big enough to have a team that handles office moves - from then on there’s always a “next move” scheduled.
Too many trophies, regardless of what they're named.