Roundtable: Who is the league's 2007-08 MVP?

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Chris Paul and Kobe Bryant have been fighting for position in the MVP race, just like their respective teams -- the Hornets and Lakers -- have been battling it out atop the tight Western Conference.

Click the pics below to view our writers' MVP ballots and comments:

Abbott

Adande

Brooks

Broussard

Ford

Hill

Hollinger

M. Jackson

S. Jackson

Legler

Palmer

Rose

Sheridan

Stein

Thorpe

A season like no other has had an MVP race like no other.

The hot names early in the season were Kevin Garnett (for Boston's 29-3 start), Dwight Howard (for Orlando streaking on the road) and LeBron James (for being LeBron).

Then as it dawned on everyone that the Lakers and the Hornets were for real, and might not fade as in seasons past, two more names broke through: Kobe Bryant and Chris Paul.

From there, it became a question of what voters (and fans) valued most:

• Garnett's defense and leadership toward the biggest team improvement in NBA history;
• Howard's impersonation of Shaq … and Superman;
• LeBron's amazing numbers in the face of team turmoil;
• Paul's mastery of the point guard position and firm control of the surprising Hornets;
• Bryant's key role in leading the Lakers while holding the unofficial title of Best Two-Way Player in the Game.

In the end, KB24 prevailed narrowly over CP3 on ESPN.com's ballots, as many expect to happen in the official voting results. Bryant's supporters made clear their vote was not a "lifetime achievement award," but at the same time, many have wondered how long he must wait to win. Since Paul is just 22 years old, and James is only 23, presumably their time will come, some would say. And Garnett took home his MVP trophy four years ago.

We will remember 2007-08 for many things, including the rebirth of the Celtics (thanks, KG) and the New Orleans renaissance (thanks, CP). And it remains to be seen what dramatic stories are in front of us in the next 10 weeks. But in any case, we won't be able to tell the tale of this past season without Kobe, from his heated accusations of last spring and summer to his success with Team USA to his surprising and gratifying star turn as the leader of a potentially great Lakers team.

For those reasons and many more, Kobe Bean Bryant is the ESPN.com choice for NBA MVP.

ESPN.com's NBA MVP Ballot
Rank	Player	Stats
	Kobe Bryant Los Angeles Lakers Shooting Guard Team record: 56-25	Points per game: 28.4 Rebounds per game: 6.3 Assists per game: 5.4 Kobe's complete statistics
	Chris Paul New Orleans Hornets Point Guard Team record: 55-25	Points per game: 21.1 Assists per game: 11.6 Steals per game: 2.7 Paul's complete statistics
	Kevin Garnett Boston Celtics Power Forward Team record: 64-16	Points per game: 19.0 Rebounds per game: 9.3 Assists per game: 3.5 Garnett's complete statistics
	LeBron James Cleveland Cavaliers Small Forward Team record: 44-36	Points per game: 30.0 Rebounds per game: 7.9 Assists per game: 7.2 Complete stats
	Dwight Howard Orlando Magic Center Team record: 50-30	Points per game: 20.9 Rebounds per game: 14.3 Blocks per game: 2.2 Complete stats

The Tally

Kobe Bryant: 64 points (9 first-place votes, 2 second, 3 third, 1 fourth)
Chris Paul: 60 points (4 first-place votes, 8 second, 2 third, 1 fourth)
Kevin Garnett: 44 points (1 first-place vote, 4 second, 5 third, 3 fourth, 2 fifth)
LeBron James: 37 points (1 first-place vote, 1 second, 5 third, 5 second, 3 fifth)
Dwight Howard: 10 points (3 fourth-place votes, 4 fifth)
Amare Stoudemire: 6 points (2 fourth-place votes, 2 fifth)
Tim Duncan: 1 point
Manu Ginobili: 1 point
Tracy McGrady: 1 point
Hedo Turkoglu: 1 point

Five points awarded for first-place votes, four points for second place, and so on.

Click here to view our writers' ballots and comments

Henry Abbott | J.A. Adande | Maurice Brooks | Chris Broussard | Chad Ford | Jemele Hill
John Hollinger | Mark Jackson | Scoop Jackson | Tim Legler | Chris Palmer | Jalen Rose
Chris Sheridan | Marc Stein | David Thorpe

Original here

Look! In the Sky. It’s a Rocket Racer.

The planes the league will use are based on a small jet sold by Velocity Aircraft, a league-owned company in Florida.

The racers may finally be reaching the starting line.

The Rocket Racing League, a long-promised attempt to create a kind of Nascar of the skies, will hold its first exhibition races this year, its founders said.

The races are promised as a kind of living video game — but louder — with a virtual raceway laid out in the sky that will be visible on projection screens at the site of each event.

Racers in rocket-powered aircraft will fly four laps around a five-mile “track” at anywhere from 150 feet to 1,500 feet above the ground. The planes, designed to fly at 340 miles an hour, will start side by side, two at a time. The pilots include professional test pilots who received their training in the military and a former astronaut.

As pilots follow the course, spectators will be able to see alternate views from remote cameras and the cockpits. The league has signed up six teams so far.

“We’re taking the business of auto racing and the business of air shows and we’re combining them,” said Granger Whitelaw, the league’s chief executive and a partner in professional auto racing teams. The races will consist of four heats, each of which will take about 15 minutes, he said.

The announcements are to be made at a news conference planned for Monday at the Yale Club in Midtown Manhattan.

The planes the league will use are based on a small jet sold by Velocity Aircraft, a league-owned company in Florida. The planes will be modified to handle a rocket engine that burns liquid oxygen and kerosene.

The engines should be loud enough to satisfy the decibel-hungry fans of racing and air shows, Whitelaw said, and produce a bright 10-to-15-foot flame.

The engines will come from two companies, Whitelaw said: Xcor Aerospace of Mojave, Calif., and Armadillo Aerospace of Mesquite, Tex. Armadillo was founded by John Carmack, a high-tech businessman who created successful video games, including Doom and Quake.

The first public taste of rocket racing will take place Aug. 1 and Aug. 2 in Oshkosh, Wis., Whitelaw said, at the annual Experimental Aircraft Association air show. It will involve two of the sleek aircraft developed for the league. The racers will also perform at air shows in Nevada and New Mexico. (More information is available at rocketracingleague.com.)

Competition should begin in 2009, the founders said.

That is quite a bit later than the league planned. Rocket Racing was announced in 2005, and the company released animations showing what a race might look like, with plenty of swooping and blazing rockets. The founders said then that the first races would be held in 2006.

The league’s plans have faltered in the interim. A video game based on the races that the founders said would be produced has not emerged, and one of its original teams, Leading Edge Rocket Racing, dropped out last year, issuing a statement that suggested the league was in disarray.

“Some of the things took longer than we had anticipated,” Whitelaw said. He added, “We’re 15 months behind where I thought we would be, which is not too shabby.”

The league’s co-founder, Peter Diamandis, served as chairman of the X Prize Foundation, which awarded the $10 million Ansari X Prize in 2004 for the first privately financed human flight to space. Diamandis said in an e-mail interview that “most pioneers who enter this business are, typically, optimists, and tend to believe things can be accomplished faster than it really takes.”

The league, he said, fits into a broader goal of “making space a firsthand experience” for people, and driving down the cost of getting to space through commercial ventures.

Whitelaw stressed that the league was a business. It will patent technological innovations on its racers, like safety features, in hopes of making money off them should they make their way into general aviation, and it will try to build profits out of television and merchandising rights. The company will also sell conventional jet-engine versions of the Velocity racer, he said.

Diamandis said, “If we do our job right, many of these new technologies will end up in both space-related hardware and general aviation — just like technologies pioneered in Formula and Indy Racing end up in the cars we drive.”

He acknowledged that flying rockets involved the risk of accidents and death, an issue that has raised questions about the viability of space tourism. Racing, however, is a different arena, with a higher level of accepted risk, he said.

Original here

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