Steve Nash is the face the NBA would like to adopt at the moment: relatively young, but not too young. Hip, but not too hip.

Intelligent enough to attempt to read The Communist Manifesto without losing his mind over it. Alluring to the corporate types commissioner David Stern so badly wants to woo. And able to boast an "international" flavour, even if that flavour comes from Canada.

Apart from the "cool" quotient, Dallas Mavericks forward Dirk Nowitski can claim much the same. Both are impeccably talented, and both have earned at least one of the last three NBA MVP awards.

Problem is, neither of was the league's best player in the year(s) he won it, or the most valuable to his team.

That honour belonged in each case to Kobe Bryant, and indications from the FIBA Americas Tournament are that Kobe hasn't fallen off in the slightest. In fact, he's improved.

Which does not bode well for his competitors, and will likely force MVP voters to face a difficult question: can Kobe remain at the peak of his game for yet another season and continue to go unrecognized?

The answer, of course, is yes and he probably will be, unless his talent-less Lakers are able to manufacture a run deep into the playoffs.

Whatever attempts are made to turn the MVP award into a serious exercise, it is largely a popularity contest, and Kobe remains unpopular to most journalists not named Jim Gray.

But if Kobe is again the NBA's scorer, and again murders the competition with multiple 50-point games; if he continues to attempt to make his team mates better, and if he remains as indispensable to the Lakers as he currently is, scribes will be hard-pressed to overlook him again.

They likely will, of course. LeBron James is the odds-on favourite to take the crown this year, and there are a host of others who will clamour for it along with Bryant.

At the end of the day, however, Kobe satisfies the two most often-cited criteria for the award: he is the best player in the league, and certainly the most valuable to his team. (His Lakers would lose badly to Nash's Phoenix Suns if Bryant and Nash were taken from their respective rosters.)

The question is not whether Kobe deserves to be MVP this year. It's why he hasn't had the that honour three times already.

Learn more about this author, Ben Forrest.
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