Voting for series MVP is traditionally done with some collusion among the voters. When Iguodala won Finals mvp, Curry got zero votes. If they had split the votes, LeBron would have won. But the winner must be from the winning team!
And along those lines -- the East :
Similar to the Curry Conf. FMVP, I have no problem with a strong “winning team player” presumption for the award. However, my issue lies with the groupthink/collusion on that part of media members, particularly for the unanimous or near-unanimous selections.
I know the pool is significantly smaller and slightly different than the regular season MVP, but it’s hard to believe that 100 voters cannot agree on the former over an 82-game sample while there still being almost universal agreement with regard to an FMVP over 4-7 games.
To that effect, Butler only receiving 1 Conf. MVP vote, despite being far and away the most impactful player in the series, is simply baffling to me.
Consistency is also a thing. That was supposedly key to Iggy's trophy in 2015 Finals.
Over in the Conf. Finals thread I kept track of player "wins" after each game and now extract each game for players:
Curry clearly outplayed Luka in G1, slightly in G5, and his best was almost as good as Luka.
Games 4 thru 7 were all good to great for Tatum. Butler was 2/4 in those. For the series 3-3-1