There are beauties and there are beasts. In the NBA both are considered for MVP consideration. Chris Paul with his 21 points, 11.6 assists to only 2.5 turnovers, and league-leading 2.7 steals per game is a beauty. Kevin Garnett, who led the Boston Celtics to 66 victories and was the Defensive Player of the Year, is a beast.

But neither won the MVP.

The man who did win, where voting is predicated on many things, none of which are criteria prescribed by the league, is both. He is Kobe Bryant.

Bryant’s statistics were not as eye-popping as Paul’s, though he did average 28.3 ppg, 6.3 rpg and 5.4 apg. As far as shooting guards go, his 28.3 ppg are first over second-place Kevin Martin by nearly five points, his 6.3 rpg are 1.5 more per game than his next competitor (Manu Ginobili) and his assists are .7 per game more than the 4.5 averaged by Ginobili. He also led all shooting guards in steals and blocks per game. If you throw in guard-forwards, he is second in rebounds to Josh Howard (7.0) and second in assists to Tracy McGrady (5.9).

What Bryant did far better than any other player in the league according to voters, is lead his team. While Garnett is publicly known as the leader of the Celtics, reporters familiar with Boston say that behind the scenes Ray Allen is the true leader of the team. The leader of the Hornets is said to be iron-fisted but extremely fair headed coach Byron Scott.

With Los Angeles, Bryant is the man. Period. Yes, he has a constant mentor in Phil Jackson, but make no mistake, it is Bryant who every teammate is watching. Bryant is the person with the most experience and is therefore the person who has the ear of every player. And it is Bryant who can, on the floor, choose to involve every other player or take the game into his own hands to the detriment of the players around him.

Sure he has his detractors in the press. Rob Parker of the Detroit News, for instance, says Bryant is “a sham.” He says that “when things are good he says all the right things.” But that’s “only when things are good. I wanna see him be a good teammate when things are bad.”

Parker, though, through his numerous appearances on ESPN programs, 1st and 10 as well as First Take, and in his columns with Detroit News, is prone to delving into hyperbole and making gross blanket statements without backing them with substance.

The question about Bryant, for sportswriters like Parker, is how many truly great players take losing well?

The short answer is none.

A more complete assessment of Bryant’s performance this season by Parker and those writers who share some or all of his beliefs would reveal that Bryant has made fundamental changes in his attitude toward his teammates and the system in which he plays. Superstars calling out teammates or coaches is nothing new for superstars in the NBA. Magic Johnson did it and got Paul Westhead fired. After losing unexpectedly to the Houston Rockets in the first round of the 1980-81 playoffs, Johnson said flatly that his teammates needed to be more professional and take teams seriously and that they needed to get better.

Michael Jordan was known for excoriating teammates during practices and in games; behind closed doors Jordan was willing to engage in fisticuffs if he felt a teammate was failing to give maximum effort. He also got Doug Collins fired. No sooner than did Jordan assume the mantle of the NBA’s best player did he begin to demand that Chicago’s management build a championship team and that his teammates match his fire and play like champions.

Today it is an annual exercise for the Cleveland and some of the New York press to engage in the, what will the Cavalier management do to bring in the players to place around LeBron James necessary to bring a Larry O’Brien trophy to Cleveland? James himself has consistently made sly references to his preference to play in New York - and probably in Brooklyn where his friend Shaun Carter - better-known as Jay Z - is part owner of the New Jersey Nets and has worked feverishly with majority owner Bruce Ratner to move the Nets to the NYC borough.

Yet Bryant’s on and off-court demands and personal foibles have, in the past, been met with skepticism, at least by the press. And they might have cost him one or two MVP awards when he has hands-down been the best player in the NBA for the past five years.

What separates Bryant from his MVP competitors this season is that he has figured out, with the help of head coach Phil Jackson, the keys to squeeze out the best from a team, which until the arrival of Pau Gasol with 30 games remaining in the season, was without another All-Star.

As Jordan had a mentor in Phil Jackson, so does Bryant in the same, but evolved man. Through Bryant we can see that Jackson has, when most people are staid and unmoving, evolved and realizes that today’s young player and young veteran player are of a completely different psychological makeup than the men who surrounded Jordan. And as a result, these players must be motivated in a completely different manner. Bryant, rather than rankle at Jackson’s motivational methods because they might be at odds with his extra-human want to win and the abject anger he feels when he see anything less than personal excellence around him, has too evolved.

The Kobe Bryant we see today and the Kobe Bryant sports journalists with MVP voting capacity see is a man who leads by instructing, prodding and opening himself to playfulness - all with the purpose of emphasizing strengths almost to the exclusion of concentrating on weaknesses. There is no more of the, “tear them down to build them up,” mentality from Jackson or, more importantly, Bryant; no more snide remarks to the press about the inadequacies of teammates, no more on-court berating by the team’s superstar.

The result is a team that, of its 12 players who received meaningful playing time during the regular season, only three were born before 1980, Bryant (1978), Lamar Odom (1979), and the “old man” Derek Fisher (1974). It just so happens that this team successful beyond both its wildest dreams and its collective ability.

Just think of the five main players around Bryant. Lamar Odom has been known as an injury-prone underachiever, Derek Fisher is thought to be too old to keep up with the league’s bevy of young and accomplished point guards, Gasol came to the Lakers with the tag of being gutless in the clutch, Vladimir Radmonovic is the flake who wrenched his leg snowboarding and lied about it to Lakers management, and Luke Walton was thought to be too slow afoot to be anything other than the third or fourth player off the bench on any team.

By no means is this a stellar cast. Without Bryant, it is much more a 30 to 35-win team than it is a Western Conference leading, 57-game winning team. However, with the Phil Jackson and Kobe Bryant of last season, the team would look much more like the Denver Nuggets of this season playing.

And this is where I, in my own assessment of the league’s MVP, leave the at least 50-win criteria, the personal stats and the rest behind. The criteria that I feel should be universal, that is largely ignored by pundits and fans alike, is what type of leader the player is. And the question here is, if the team’s leader is an MVP candidate, is he the catalyst for his teammates maximizing their talent that season?

That is what separates Kobe Bryant from Chris Paul and Kevin Garnett.

With Bryant, this season there was a fundamental change in his coach’s personality. Before training camp began Phil Jackson approached Bryant with this new approach and Bryant saw its value and became the player go-between Jackson and the team.

Jackson, through Bryant, has been able to understand that the present generation of NBA player does not take kindly to screaming and performing a job just because someone with a title of authority tells them it is their job. However, true credit must be given to Jackson for seeing this, understanding it, and passing this knowledge on to his team’s leader. Bryant must be credited with embracing Jackson’s change and channeling it to his younger teammates. It is Bryant who is responsible for fostering a team climate that makes for selflessness on the court, the ability to explore and embellish on the nuances of the triangle offense, and to praise each other no matter the teammate’s strengths and weaknesses.

The result of this implausible transformation is a team with the best record in the Western Conference where the Lakers were separated from the eighth-placed Denver Nuggets by only seven games. Yet when they met in this season’s playoffs, Los Angeles reduced the Nuggets to quitters.

Now Los Angeles is up 2-1 on Utah. Despite the Jazz’s clutch-and-grab tactics and borderline dirty play the Lakers have so far “routined” Utah. They are playing with such a confident ease that all six of their playoff wins more resemble regular season blowouts than they do titanic postseason struggles. In fact, after Game 2 against Utah, Jackson said his team was never threatened offensively.

Few outside of the basketball world realize how monumental a statement that is, especially to make during the playoffs. Jerry Sloan’s teams pride themselves on their tough defense but LA has eased away to 109-98 and 120-110 victories to open the series.

It is Bryant who controls these playoff contests like a master puppeteer, just as he did for 57 wins this season with a young, still in the process of developing, team. Beyond statistics and beyond wins is that which cannot be seen but is the thread that runs through every team and separates the successful season from the underachieving campaign or the bust. It is the nature of the leader. The individuals on the team can progress, players can be added and subtracted to aid chemistry or to fill needed roles, but it is the team leader who conducts this orchestra and makes the parts work night in and night out. And while Paul plays a beautiful game and while Garnett prowls the lane area like an angry lion, Kobe Bryant has elevated himself as a human being.

And because Kobe Bryant embarked on and succeeded in making one of the greatest personality changes in recent NBA history - and this includes the Jordan years - he is, hands down, the 2007-2008 NBA MVP.

Photo Credit: Icon Sports Media

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