After an amazing regular season and on the heels of 40 point showing last night in a win against the Portland Trailblazers, Stephen Curry has been named the 2015-16 NBA MVP.
It’s not a surprise that Curry won. Reports had him winning the honor yesterday, it was just by how much he won it by. This was, after all, a season dominated by his Golden State Warriors; a historic season that saw a multitude of NBA records broken and firsts.
Curry just didn’t win the MVP, he added to the spectacular season by becoming the NBA’s first-ever unanimous MVP. Every single voter chose Curry as the league’s Most Valuable Player – that’s never been done before.
Here’s what ESPN tweeted out:
There has been some near-unanimous votes in the past when players received 120 of the possible 121 votes. In fact, the one-vote-short-of-unanimous happened twice — Shaquile O’Neal in 1999-00 and LeBron James in 2012-13. No one wanted to have the infamous reputation of a Fred Hickman or Gary Washburn of The Boston Globe, the media guys responsible for being the sole outliers those years.
Honestly, a vote against Curry would have been magnified after his clear impact and domination he showed in last night’s record-setting overtime playoff win over the Blazers.
Curry is the 11th back-to-back MVP of the league joining the likes of legendary hall-of-fame icons to take home consecutive MVP trophies. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (1971, ’72 and 1976, ’77), Larry Bird (1984, ’85, ’86) and Michael Jordan (1991, ’92).
The others to win back-to-back MVPs are Bill Russell (1961, ’62, ’63), Wilt Chamberlain (1966, ’67, ’68), Moses Malone (1982, ’83), Tim Duncan (2002, ’03) and LeBron (2009, ’10 and 2012, ’13).
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