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Kevin Pelton, ESPN Senior Writer 9y

NBA's 2014 Ballon d'Or winner

NBA

Next month in Zurich, FIFA will present the highest honor for professional soccer players, the annual Ballon d'Or (French for "golden ball"). Unlike the NBA's most valuable player trophy, the Ballon d'Or rewards performance in a variety of competitions throughout the entire year -- the calendar year, not the soccer and basketball seasons that cross over.

A hoops version of the Ballon d'Or would incorporate the results of the playoffs, as well as international competition -- factors that go into our subjective assessments of players but are never considered when it comes to basketball's highest honors. As a result, it's a better reflection of which basketball player is really on top of the world at any given time.

So, in the spirit of the Ballon d'Or, I've invented the "Insider Golden Basketball" and retroactively awarded it going back through 1990. Congratulations to our winners: 

I tried to choose the player I suspected a voting panel would have favored in any given year. That proved to favor postseason performance over regular-season success. Of the previous 24 winners, 20 also were Finals MVP, as compared to 10 regular-season MVPs. (Nine of the 10 regular-season MVPs chosen also won Finals MVP, with Bryant in 2008 the lone exception.) Another selection, Duncan in 2007, was the best player on the title-winning team but not Finals MVP (That went to Tony Parker).

Incorporating the playoffs works to the advantage of players such as O'Neal, who won just one MVP during the three-year span when he was the league's best player and his Lakers were three-time champions. The Golden Basketball better captures O'Neal's dominance of the basketball world.

Occasionally, the choice got tricky. In 1990, Finals MVP Isiah Thomas had relatively little impact in the regular season while regular-season MVP Magic Johnson saw his Lakers crash out of the playoffs in a second-round upset. I figured voters would have rewarded the league's best player, Jordan, despite his Chicago Bulls losing to Thomas' Pistons in a seven-game series in the Eastern Conference finals.

The most interesting choice was 2004, when the champion Pistons lacked a dominant star. Chauncey Billups, the Finals MVP, did not receive a single vote for regular-season MVP. While voters might have simply rubber-stamped regular-season MVP Kevin Garnett, I saw this as an opportunity to reward Ginobili for his role in Argentina's historic run to the gold medal at the 2004 Athens Olympics -- still the only gold won by a country besides the USA since NBA players began participating in the Olympics.

Fittingly, 2014 shapes up as another difficult choice. The Finals MVP, Kawhi Leonard, wasn't even an All-Star in the regular season, and the Spurs won with depth rather than behind a star individual. Leonard didn't make my list of three finalists for the award.


The 2014 ESPN Insider Golden Basketball Finalists

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