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— If ever there was a year for the NBA to experiment with delaying the awarding of Most Valuable Player until the end of the playoffs, this is it, when a team could play as many postseason games as nearly half the 66-game regular-season schedule.
Typically, the MVP award is decided by an 82-game composite. This season 66 plus the playoffs would come close to that total, matching it exactly with a modern-day version of Moses Malone's fo'-fo'-fo'.
But even more than that, it would allow for the ultimate LeBron James litmus test, something about more than mere regular-season minutes, something also about NBA finals fortitude.
Because right now, we're in a bind. On one hand, James never has been better, including his back-to-back MVP honors in 2009 and 2010.
On the other hand, there would be a certain unease about rewarding James for a 66-game sample when you're simply not sure where the next 24 or so would take him, considering they never have taken him to the ultimate prize.
Perhaps, since it's all computerized now anyway, there could be an extra box on the ballot that reads, "Validate only in case of a championship."
Then, sort of like those carnival games, if LeBron earns Finals MVP, he could trade it in with David Stern for a super prize, a regular-season MVP complete with postseason validation.
It's not going to happen, not as long as Stern continues to talk about Finals MVP as some sort of postseason end-all, when we know it is for a mere two-week sample.
That brings us back to LeBron as MVP and whether what we're seeing now is anything more than we saw in his previous two MVP seasons, statistics inflated through regular-season domination.
"I mean, he's a stats-stuffer," Dwyane Wade said the other day as a compliment, but something that could be taken the opposite way, as James' solely being a player capable of loading up on stats that end up as vapid validation.
"He's the kind of player," Wade continued, "that every year can be considered as an MVP candidate, because he's going to be on a good team, he's going to make sure his team is good, and he's going to have the numbers."
Again, "numbers."
For James, they are undeniable, and perhaps even more impressive considering they come alongside Wade and Chris Bosh, when there seemingly shouldn't be enough numbers to go around.
Yet listen to James, and even he offers championship context.
"The best basketball I ever played probably was my senior year of high school," he said of his most recent championship outside of international play. That was in 2002-03, when he led Akron's St. Vincent-St. Mary's to the Ohio championship and a mythical national title.
Instead, James urges perspective.
"I think I've played some good basketball," he said. "For the first third of the season, I'm playing some pretty good basketball and if you look at the numbers, you would say it is."
Numbers. Again.
Granted, numbers can mean something, like when Kobe Bryant puts himself at the top of the Lakers' scoring chart and remains on a potential pace to top the NBA's all-time list.
But only with championship context are numbers validated.
So the greater issue is, what will translate from this current success to postseason success?
James continually has said he's emerging as a different player than the one who wilted in the 2011 finals against the Mavericks.
"I just worked on my game this offseason, mostly in the post and off the dribble," he said. "It's always good when you work on something and you implement it into a game situation and you see it works.
"And the fact is my teammates are giving me an opportunity to do the things that I know I'm capable of and I'm able to capitalize."
And yet, recently, when the Heat have needed LeBron at the finish, there has been scant time in the post, but rather more of the type of "hero" all-or-nothing shots that didn't fall last June against the Mavericks and still aren't falling all that often this season.
The Heat have yet to close a game with a post isolation for LeBron. James continually has pulled up for jumpers when cast in such scenarios.
Much, of course, will have to do with matchups in the postseason, whether opponents can put bigger and lengthier bodies on James to prevent those post-ups, as the Bulls can with Luol Deng or the Mavericks could with Shawn Marion.
As for the off-the-dribble game, where James excelled during a recent 15-0 Heat fourth-quarter, game-deciding blitz against the 76ers as the de facto point guard, it will come down to whether the opposition goes small, forcing the Heat to keep at least one point guard on the floor, as Dallas did last June with J.J. Barea and Jason Kidd.
The LeBron package, no doubt, is an expanded package.
But it is one currently going through dry runs against the likes of the Bucks and Pistons and Hornets and Raptors and Cavaliers, making the Heat's latest run of success little more than a warm-up act for deeper, better-balanced playoff opponents.
Is LeBron James the current front-runner for MVP? By the statistics and the standings, sure.
But the post game, the off-the-dribble game, the enhanced rebounding will only count for something in May and more specifically in June.
Otherwise all the numbers and even a third MVP will add up to nothing. Again.
Ira Winderman writes regularly for NBCSports.com and covers the Heat and the NBA for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. You can follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/IraHeatBeat .
