This season’s MVP race

USUALLY during this time of the PBA season, when the elimination round of the final conference of the year is nearing its end, one thing that is quite interesting to look at is the MVP race.
That award has been the most coveted individual trophy of all. It practically guarantees the winner of inclusion in the All-Time Greatest list and makes one a truly worthy candidate into the PBA Hall of Fame.
There have been multiple winners of the MVP in the past, the most notable among them being Ramon Fernandez and Alvin Patrimonio, who both won it four times in their respective careers.
Some say that Ramon should have won it five times, because San Miguel Beer, which he was a part of, achieved the Grand Slam in 1989 just when Fernandez was playing the best basketball of his storied career.
That miss by Fernandez was the only time that an MVP didn’t come from the most dominant team of the season.
In 1976, when Crispa, under Baby Dalupan, first recorded the Triple Crown sweep, a sweet-shooting forward out of Santo Tomas in the UAAP with the name of Bogs Adornado won the MVP.
There was no dispute there.
When Crispa again pulled off the trick in 1983 under Tommy Manotoc, Abet Guidaben won the first of his two MVP awards. No one raised a howl because Guidaben was certainly a cut above the rest that year.
Alaska also immortalized itself as an all-time PBA great when Johnny Abarrientos led the then-Milkmen to the Grand Slam in 1996 under the outspoken Tim Cone.
Abarrientos would go on to cement his place in the league as one of the greatest point guards of all time, standing out in a year when the competition was truly wide open and when the country wanted a new sentinel it could identify with.
Now, that year that Fernandez missed winning another MVP will go down in history as one of the biggest surprises ever.
Benjie Paras, just three years after leading the University of the Philippines Maroons to their first and only UAAP crown, not only upstaged ‘El Presidente,’ but he also became the league’s first — and only thus far — Rookie of the Year-MVP.
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No one thought that a caper like that could happen again. In fact, it still hasn’t. But it could this season.
With San Mig Coffee within another jewel of annexing the Triple Crown sweep and looking very much capable of doing it, no Mixer is making a strong case for the MVP award at this point.
San Mig Coffee has been such a balanced team under Tim Cone that none of its players are in the running — as of this writing — for the MVP, with defensive anchor Marc Pingris the best-placed player in ninth spot overall.
Third-year point guard Marc Barroca at No. 12, Peter June Simon 14th and James Yap, the former two-time MVP, is at No, 19 and practically way out of it all.
For sure, none of those San Mig players will be telling us that they are shooting for the MVP. Team always comes first — that’s what all PBA players say — and that the Grand Slam is of utmost importance.
But for someone from the outside looking in, it certainly would be better to see the MVP coming from the most dominant team of the season.
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Right now, June Mar Fajardo of San Miguel Beer, its 6-foot-10 cornerstone and winner of the Rookie of the Year award last season, has a slim lead over teammate Arwind Santos, the reigning MVP.
And from the looks of it, especially if San Miguel happens to win the Governors’ Cup or even just makes the Finals opposite even San Mig Coffee, the duo would be disputing the award when the voting comes in.
The PBA has an entirely different voting system compared to that of the NBA, which determines its MVP only by votes coming from the covering press that number more than a hundred.
The PBA uses statistical points to determine the candidates and gives weight to those points when doing the final tabulation.
After the statistical points determines the candidates (usually, the top five at the end of the season make it to the list), votes from players, the media and the PBA will help determine the winner, each carrying different weights.
And with the PBA playing three conferences a year, unlike the NBA which crowns just one champion in a season, that makes for a wider open race since there could be as many as six heroes for the season should there be six different finalists for the year.
If San Mig goes on to win the Grand Slam and either Fajardo or Santos wind up as MVPs, it won’t mean that either of the two Beermen is not deserving of the award.
It will just be something for the PBA to look into, because many people simply believe that if one team is such a dominant force for the season, the MVP should rightly come from it.