Throughout most of its history, the NBA has annually granted Most Valuable Player Awards to recognize its best competitors in the regular season and in the NBA Finals. These are the most substantial honors that an NBA player can receive. And since 2022, two Conference Finals MVPs have also been awarded each year to further celebrate achievement in the postseason.
Unfortunately, though, there has never been an award for the most valuable player in the entirety of the playoffs. For the vast majority of the league’s history, the only individual postseason award was entirely based on one series and only available to one team. As a consequence, some of the most incredible performances in the history of the sport have gone without any official recognition. So this project intends to retroactively celebrate some of those performances by asking this subreddit to award Playoff MVPs for every playoff tournament from 1980 to the present.
#Previous Winners
1980: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
1981: Larry Bird
1982: Magic Johnson
1983: Moses Malone
1984: Larry Bird
1985: Larry Bird
1986: Larry Bird
1987: Larry Bird
1988: Magic Johnson
1989: Michael Jordan
1990: Michael Jordan
1991: Michael Jordan
#How to Vote
I will provide three different comments beneath each post representing three Playoff MVP candidates for the season being discussed. Additionally, if anybody feels that another player is deserving of candidacy, they can add a comment for that player to nominate them for the award using the process described in the following section. You can reply to these comments with arguments for or against any of the players to convince other voters of your position. Whichever player has the most upvotes after five days will be declared the Playoff MVP of that year, which will be announced the following week.
#Nominating Players
If you would like to nominate a player, simply post a comment for that athlete using the same format as the comments for the other candidates. This should include the player’s name and a link to the Basketball Reference page of the team that they played for that season. Here is an example that you can copy:
PMVP Candidate: J.R. Smith - Stats and Record
#Voting Criteria
Since the NBA doesn’t have any official criteria for how the MVP is decided, I’m not going to provide any specific criteria for this award either. However, I will suggest that voters judge the playoff MVP by the same standards that they use to judge the regular season MVP, such as individual statistics, team success, and overall impact on the game.
#1992 NBA Playoffs
You can reference the following pages about this postseason as you consider which candidate to vote for or nominate.