It has been announced that Derrick Rose is this year’s recipient of the NBA’s Most Valuable Player Award.  Rose is the youngest player to ever win this award.  He now joins the ranks of Lebron James, Kobe Bryant, Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, and many more players who have received this award.

This year’s Chicago Bulls team was one of the surprise teams in the NBA.  Under the direction of head coach Tom Thibodeau, the Bulls earned the best record in the league, marking a huge improvement over previous years.  Rose has been the leader of the team on the court, and has been the driving force in that improvement.

I have been hopeful that Rose would win the MVP award this year.  I think that from year to year the definition of how players earn this award is changed.  For instance, a few years ago when Steve Nash won consecutive MVP awards, he was rewarded because he made his teammates better, thus making him invaluable to his team’s success.  I felt at that time that it should have gone to Kobe because he single-handedly led his team, which featured players such as Smush Parker and Kwame Brown as starters, to the playoffs and was far and away the best player in the world, thus making him the most valuable to his otherwise terrible team.  Since Kobe won his first and only MVP award, Lebron James has gone on to win two consecutive MVPs.  The criteria for which James won his awards was because he was viewed as the best player in the league.

This year, I was afraid that James would win a third consecutive MVP not because he continued to outperform everyone else statistically, but because there was some sentiment that he deserved to win because his old team was so terrible.  The argument became that he must have been so great, that he managed to take a terrible team to the playoffs.  Sound familiar?  Anyway, I felt that was a stupid reason to give an award away, simply because of how terrible his old team was without him. Congratulations D-Rose.  You deserve it.