via ESPN.com
East MVP of the First Trimester
One thing we should all be able to agree on: This is the toughest call on the board after 30-something games.
You can accept LeBron James' publicly issued invitation to delete him and Dwyane Wade from consideration because they allegedly neutralize each other in the MVP race … which was actually a thinly veiled/pretty sly way to try to force voters to do the exact opposite.
You can also notify Dwight Howard that we'll check back in during Trimester 2 after we've had a longer look at the Magic's extreme makeover … since all of Dwight's undeniable offensive improvement to go with his peerless command of the paint can't change the fact that Orlando started so poorly that management felt it had to shake things up dramatically with two big trades.
You'd still have to find a way to separate Stoudemire and Derrick Rose after all that.
Good luck.
If you can pardon the Bulls for Wednesday's deflating crunch-time failure in New Jersey, Rose has the Bulls on a 55-win pace even though Carlos Boozer has missed 15 games and Joakim Noah has missed 10. That's the stuff that should wow you even more than Rose's gaudy statistical production (23.8 points, 8.3 assists, 4.5 rebounds per game) and how he's hiked his success rate from 3-point range to a robust .394.
Stoudemire, however, is the guy who was undaunted by the prospect of being painted as New Yorkers' consolation prize when the Knicks didn't get LeBron, fully confident (delusional?) that he could single-handedly lead the Knicks back to prominence … and actually has them pointed that way faster than anyone imagined. The Knicks have little depth, play little D and started 3-8, but Stoudemire leads the league in fourth-quarter scoring (7.4 ppg) and has quickly hushed all of us media mavens who said his numbers would drop off dramatically without Steve Nash spoon-feeding him. No Nash? Amare simply formed a successful new partnership with Raymond Felton instead.
I know you're probably wincing as you brace for the inevitable speech about how much team success always plays in the MVP thinking here, but the standards are actually a little looser at the first-trimester pole. Stoudemire has little to apologize for anyway with the Knicks at 20-14, which computes to a 48-win pace, with No. 7 Indiana sitting four games under .500 and five games back.
Common sense says the Knicks won't maintain that pace as the schedule gets tougher and the regular-season grind starts to wear on Mike D'Antoni's tight rotation. But that likelihood -- along with the well-worn stat about how we haven't seen an MVP from a team that won less than 50 games since Moses Malone in 1981-82 from the 46-win Houston Rockets -- only helped break this Amare/D-Rose deadlock.
Translation: Rose can probably count on factoring heavily in the MVP race all season. I wanted to make sure, since Stoudemire doesn't have the same luxury, that he's properly feted now for delivering in the harshest media glare in the league.
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