The Bill Russell NBA Finals Most Valuable Player Award (formerly known as the NBA Finals Most Valuable Player Award) is an annual National Basketball Association (NBA) award given since the 1969 NBA Finals. The award is decided by a panel of nine media members, who cast vote after the conclusion of the final round. The person with the highest votes wins the award. In at least one NBA Finals, fans balloting on NBA.com accounted for the tenth vote. Originally, the award was a black trophy with a gold basketball-shaped sphere at the top, similar to the Larry O'Brien Championship Trophy, until a smaller trophy was introduced in 2005.
Since its inception, the award has been given to 27 different players. Michael Jordan, who led the Chicago Bulls to six NBA Championships from 1991 to 1993 and 1996 to 1998, is the only player to win the award six times. Magic Johnson, Shaquille O'Neal, and Tim Duncan all won the award three times in their career while Willis Reed, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Larry Bird, Hakeem Olajuwon, and Kobe Bryant won the award twice. Jordan and O'Neal are the only players to win the award in three consecutive seasons (Jordan accomplished the feat on two separate occasions). Olajuwon and Bryant have won the award in two consecutive seasons. Abdul-Jabbar is the only player to win the award for two different teams, first with the Milwaukee Bucks in 1971, then with the Los Angeles Lakers in 1985. Johnson is the only rookie ever to win the award when he won it with the Lakers in 1980. Jerry West, the first ever awardee, won the award while being on the losing team in the NBA Finals. Olajuwon of Nigeria, who was a naturalized U.S. citizen since 1993, Tim Duncan of the U.S. Virgin Islands, Tony Parker of France (born in Belgium) and Dirk Nowitzki of Germany are the only four international players to win the award. Duncan is an American citizen, but is considered an "international" player by the NBA because he was not born in one of the fifty states or Washington, D.C. Parker and Nowitzki are the only winners to have been trained totally outside the U.S.; Olajuwon played college basketball at Houston and Duncan at Wake Forest.
On February 14, 2009, during the 2009 NBA All-Star Weekend in Phoenix, NBA Commissioner David Stern announced that the award would be renamed the "Bill Russell NBA Finals Most Valuable Player Award" in honor of 11-time NBA champion Bill Russell.
Read more about Bill Russell NBA Finals Most Valuable Player Award: Winners
Famous quotes containing the words bill, russell, valuable, player and/or award:
“Bill McKay: I thought the point was to say what I wanted.
Lucas: Well, it is. But in the right way, and at the right time.”
—Jeremy Larner, U.S. screenwriter, and Michael Ritchie. Bill McKay (Robert Redford)
““There is Lowell, who’s striving Parnassus to climb
With a whole bale of isms tied together with rhyme,
He might get on alone, spite of brambles and boulders,
But he can’t with that bundle he has on his shoulders,
The top of the hill he will ne’er come nigh reaching
Till he learns the distinction ‘twixt singing and preaching;”
—James Russell Lowell (1819–1891)
“The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the most valuable investment a writer can make with his time. It pays off slowly, your agent will sneer at it, your publisher will misunderstand it, and it will take people you have never heard of to convince them by slow degrees that the writer who puts his individual mark on the way he writes will always pay off.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“The best chess-player in Christendom may be little more than the best player of chess; but proficiency in whist implies capacity for success in all these more important undertakings where mind struggles with mind.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1845)
“The award of a pure gold medal for poetry would flatter the recipient unduly: no poem ever attains such carat purity.”
—Robert Graves (1895–1985)