Four Games that May Determine MVP

The night of the fight, you may feel a slight sting. That's pride fucking with you. Fuck pride. Pride only hurts, it never helps.

--Marsellus Wallace from Pulp Fiction


Kevin Garnett is one of the NBA’s great team players. No one who has watched the Celtics this season could doubt that statement. Nor could they doubt that his devotion to the team concept runs through the core of his being.

Yet KG is also a proud man.

This is the guy, after all, who reminded Al Jefferson that he had played in “eleven all-star games, baby.” This is the guy who talks smack basically by asserting the self-evident truth, “I’m KG and you’re not.”

So it would surprise me a great deal if KG were wholly unaware of his evolving status in the MVP race. He went from first on everyone’s list, to barely a mention as a second-tier candidate. I’ve told you what I think about the players now thought to be in the first tier, ahead of Garnett.

But the race is not over, and, if anything, the so-called frontrunners have fallen back to the pack. LeBron has lost two of three, Kobe has lost three of four, and Chris Paul lost by 21 to Detroit.

Meanwhile, KG’s Celtics went on a 10-game winning streak, and now play four games in six days against Tim Duncan’s San Antonio Spurs, the streaking Houston Rockets, the Jason Kidd emboldened Dallas Mavericks, and Paul’s Hornets, who are one game out of the first place in the West.

Before Ali-Frazier III, Tony Kornheiser wondered whether Garnett had it in him to raise the level of his play for a big game. By game’s end, the Ticket had answered that question. This time we get to evaluate Garnett’s fortitude over the course of an entire week, a preview of the playoffs, if you will.

If he rises to the occasion and the Celtics come home having won three of four, I suspect the MVP will be his. If they go 2-2, the race will go down to the wire. One and three would probably tilt the debate back in favor of the others.

Let’s see how Garnett responds.