Gonebarongone wrote:This viewpoint drives me nuts. Where do you draw the line? 7th place, 8th place? Only taking teams that win the league? Or make NCAAs? The valuable in MVP is a semantics discussion that blowhard sportswriters use in look at me columns. Every person on every team has value. And this is Player of the Year. Not MVP. It should be the best player in the league. In my mind, it's the first guy you would take in a game of 5 on 5 if you lined every A10 player up. It's not always the best player on a winner.TruePoint wrote:Bembry is terrific and is a no-brainer for first team. I don't think he is POY, though, for the same reason I didn't think ARod was the MVP on a last place Rangers team.
rodfromcranston wrote:If it was Most VALUABLE Player, it would have to be
Briante Webber, hands down.
VCU collapsed after he went out, and HVOC became
a passe term.
The best player is Bembry, and should be POY.
Is there confusion as to the criteria on this award?
Everyone is entitled to their own criteria. I actually used to feel the same way that you guys do, but my opinion has evolved. IMO, the "who would be the first pick in a pickup game" argument is dumb because you wouldn't even need to play the season to decide it using that criteria. If you were playing a pickup game of NBA players, would you ever not pick Lebron first? So does he get the MVP every year automatically without regard for how he performed during that particular season? I also think being too hung up on the literal meaning of the word "valuable" is dumb. There has to be some combination of having performed great as a player and that performance being remotely relevant.
To me, if your team finished beyond shouting distance of first place, you aren't eligible. You might be the best player, but if your team sucks, you don't matter to me. There is no objective criteria for deciding the award, and my criteria is I think Tyler Kalinoski was the player of the year in the conference because he was great and it mattered.