The Warriors were so good, they made the NBA Finals MVP debate useless

The point of the NBA Finals is to crown an NBA champion, but the vote for Finals MVP is at least the second most important subplot. It recognizes Superman performance, the difference maker in what is usually a hotly-contested series.

When LeBron James won the honor for the Cavaliers in 2016, it was the bow on an improbable 3-1 series comeback against the Warriors. The year before, Andre Iguodala just beat out James for the honors after a riveting six-game, man-on-man duel. Last year, the Warriors outclassed the Cavaliers, but an unclimactic series received a sentimental coda when Kevin Durant was voted the unanimous MVP.

So it was in 2018 that ABC tried to use a kinda/sorta MVP race between Durant and Stephen Curry to jazz up a dull Game 4. Shortly after halftime, they put up a graphic comparing Curry’s stats to Durant’s to that point.

Ostensibly the debate was interesting in the moment — Curry in theory could have gone off to stop a Durant two-peat — but it felt absurd in the context of what the Warriors were doing to the Cavs. They were in the midst of breaking the will of LeBron and company, and in the process breaking the MVP contest, as well. In this case, how you could you call either Curry or Durant “Superman” after a sweep of a series in which every game was decided by an average of 15 points? What’s the point?

This isn’t to disparage superteam-ification, but to marvel at the ways that Warriors have nerfed the way we talk about sports. During the game, I toyed with the idea of the Warriors rigging the MVP competition so that Steph could finally win, and it hit me how few teams could ever have that luxury, of setting up one of their own players to win a very real, life-affirming award as a symbolic gesture.

The Warriors aren’t the first team to have several potential MVP winners, of course, and the fact that they had multiple candidates does speak to the caliber of their team as much as does for their individual talent. The same could be said of the Spurs, for whom Tim Duncan, Tony Parker, and, later, Kawhi Leonard were all capable of being Finals MVPs.

The difference is, those Spurs MVPs came on squads that were definitively not superteams, though occasionally they won like it. All of those players were clear leaders of their iterations of a long-evolving Spurs franchise when they won. The Warriors played two tight games against Cavaliers — an overtime Game 1, in which Curry led the team with 29 points and Durant shot poorly, and an eight-point Game 3, in which Durant went off for 43 and Curry struggled. Remove either player from the Warriors’ roster and they still likely win a championship, just in five or six games instead of four. It’s impossible to say any one player led Golden State.

The Warriors are both that talented and that cohesive as a team. Within their impossible ecosystem, superstars can coexist without hierarchies and not betray the slightest hint of jealousy or ego. This is one of the greatest basketball teams to ever grace planet Earth, and the biggest piece of evidence in their favor is how they’ve made the conversations we’re supposed to be having around the sport boring and pointless.

This NBA Finals series was bittersweet — filled with incredible performances, but also lacking all but a few gasps of real basketball tension. If we can be honest, it wasn’t particularly compelling. The Cavaliers fought valiantly, but they were grossly overmatched. MVP honors this year checked off a box as a matter of routine, no matter how much we tried to hype it up as a battle.

It’s perfectly understandable if you hate that fact, but first recognize what it means that we could be so indifferent to a Finals MVP. The Warriors didn’t need a Superman to win it all, and yet they had two.