The regular season MVP award in the NBA may be the most bandied about, highly-regarded, and fiercely coveted individual award in all of professional sports. It also serves as a snapshot when looking back at a given season in NBA history to remember which players, teams and story lines were at the forefront of the league.
Because of how much pride, high-profile credibility and desire are attached to this award, it sometimes feels like an election with certain writers, media members, teams and even players (James Harden) campaigning for a certain candidate.
The Ringer thought it would be fun to play off of this idea and create a series of “MVP Attack Ads” for the top four candidates for this year’s award, Russell Westbrook, James Harden, LeBron James and Kawhi Leonard and they are all pretty genius and hilarious in their own way.
RUSSELL WESTBROOK
This MVP attack-ad uses the rare-ness of a triple-double to show that Westbrook only does things to serve the top 3% (sounds like a politician I know).
JAMES HARDEN
This one states that James Harden’s stats are a result of Mike D’Antoni’s “juicing” of players, which may be the closest to reality of all campaign themes.
LEBRON JAMES
Almost every negative sounding comment LeBron has ever made was used in this ad. They created a whole LeBron doesn’t care about those around him, all of which centered around Marv Albert’s classic “With no regard for hum life!” quote, after his nasty alley-oop dunk over Jason Terry.
KAWHI LEONARD
And last but not least, they used Kawhiet Storm’s (shout out to Jalen Rose) reserved nature as a classic campaign tactic to say that NBA fans know nothing about Leonard and therefore can’t and shouldn’t trust him.
While all extremely silly, this is a fun way to breakdown the race that is the NBA MVP award, especially in a season when all four are worthy.
