The Good Point: Love for MVP? Plus NHL Playoff Picks!

My latest for The Good Point looks at why Kevin Love is getting attention in the NBA's Most Valuable Player race, despite being outplayed in almost every way by LeBron James. To wit:

By almost any standard basketball metric, LeBron James is the best player in the NBA right now. He has the highest Player Efficiency Rating at 30.7 and 12.2 Win Shares; best in the league. On his own team, he’s putting up better numbers than the other 60 percent of the big three, especially in shooting stats like True Shooting or Effective Field Goal percentages.

In other words, James is putting up better numbers than anyone in the league, is the best player on his team, itself one of the NBA’s best. This guy should be a shoo-in for MVP, right?

So why is Kevin Love getting to much attention right now?

 Click here to read the whole thing!

And while you're here, click here to read my Good Point review of Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding!

Finally, my annual NHL Playoff picks follow the jump.

Flashfact: Remembering Bert Sugar

When Bert Sugar died last weekend, the sportswriting world didn't just lose a colourful character, it lost a unique voice: someone who knew professional sports are hype and bullshit and wasn't afraid to fill his copy with clever jokes. In an age where a backup quarterback commands a press scrum so large they have hold a media conference on a practice field, his less-than-serious while knowing almost everything attitude will be missed.

From my short piece at Flashfact:

I can’t help but wonder if there’s some kind of cosmic connection at work in New York these days. On Sunday, Bert Sugar – the last remnant of the Golden Age of Sports Writing – died at 75. On Monday, Jets quarterback Tim Tebow was introduced to a crowd so large it wouldn’t fit into the media room, forcing the presser to be held on the practice squad. As Vonnegut wrote, so it goes.

Sugar was a reminder of the past, of a long-gone print media sports writing type. He was something of a character, a half-made-up, half-for-real man in his fedora, suit and ever-present cigar. He looked like he could have stepped out of one of the old volumes of sports writing and I half expect to see his byline among the long-dead writers in the great anthology No Cheering in the Press Box.

Read the whole story by clicking here.

Further dispatches from the bottom of the sporting world

It was Brian Burke who said a chanting crowd helped push Ron Wilson out of the Air Canada Centre and onto what I assume is a golf course. It was not a parade of columnists, not a cavalcade of callers into Sportsnet Radio 590 or TSN 1050, not a trending topic on Twitter. It was the crowd.

For a long time the crowd at the ACC has been a joke, even among Leaf fans. The lower bowl, with it's outrageous pricing, years-long waiting list for season tickets and more tweed than Brooks Brothers, is a haven of Bay Street peoples. The season-seats bought by corporations who can write them off as an expense - to treat clients, natch - are what is pointed to by those who say Toronto is a losing team and cannot change. Never will change. These people will always buy tickets, supporting the team without any regard for the on-ice talent.

But what happens when even these crowds begin to boo?

The Good Point: Linsanity and Carmadness

The people at The Good Point were nice enough to let me use a word that doesn't exist in my headline: Carmadness.

I have a few ideas and one I go back to often is the hype and hyperbole of the sports section. Right now, the best example of this is happening in New York, where a seven-game win streak ushered in Linsanity and made Mike D'Antoni some kind of savant for letting Jeremy Lin run amok. And then came a cold streak and D'Antoni resigning amidst claims that Carmelo Anthony wanted him out.

It's a nice story. It's something you can spin into three, five, a whole week's worth of columns. But it's not very accurate and blaming the coach or an individual player is blaming the wrong person. And it's not just a basketball thing, either: just look at the Toronto Maple Leafs.

Anyway, read the whole thing by clicking here.