Twenty-seven individuals have been hailed as PBA MVP since the first time the award was given in 1975 during the inaugural season of Asia's oldest professional basketball league.
June Mar Fajardo stands alone on top of that list with six MVP plums, followed by legends Ramon Fernandez and Alvin Patrimonio with four each.
On Sunday, the league will announce its Season 47 MVP during the PBA Leo Awards before the start of the new season.
Before that, here's a list of controversial and underrated MVP wins throughout the years.
The controversial wins
Atoy Co (1979)
Fernandez could have had more MVPs in his career, but what seemed like his first was given to Atoy Co in 1979 after majority of the sportswriters at that time cast their votes for the Fortune Cookie. Co's Crispa Redmanizers won that year's All-Filipino Conference, but Fernandez and the Toyota Tamarraws played in all three conference finals during that season and won the Invitational Championship in the process. That's not to say Co was outstanding in only one conference, but Fernandez was just consistently great for the entire season. Many felt that was enough for him to edge out Co for the league's highest individual plum.
Benjie Paras (1989)
The Tower of Power's Rookie-MVP award will be a record that's second-to-impossible to replicate. However, some questioned that very same MVP award due to the Formula Shell Zoom Masters' lack of hardware to back it up. The San Miguel Beermen dominated that season en route to winning the Grand Slam, with the aforementioned Fernandez leading the way. That's why many felt that El Presidente should have been awarded the MVP trophy for leading the team to a historic feat, not the super rookie who got to the finals just once that season.
James Yap (2006)
To be fair, this wasn't as controversial as the first two on the list. Yap, Kerby Raymundo, and Enrico Villanueva were neck-and-neck for the award, but it did come on the heels of Raymundo's "Ako ang MVP" rant on live television. Some actually believed Raymundo had a case for his now infamous rant, while some quarters thought Villanueva did enough to win the award that Yap ultimately won. Ironically, the three would eventually play together on the same team from 2008 to 2009. Raymundo eventually admitted he regretted his outburst, and Yap went on to become the face of the league for a long time.
The underrated MVPs
Ricardo Brown (1985)
The Quick Brown Fox pioneered the Fil-foreigners in the PBA and won eight titles in a decade of playing in the PBA. In 1985, Brown cemented his name with an MVP plum by edging out established names like previous winners Abet Guidaben, Bogs Adornado, and Fernandez.
Ato Agustin (1992)
If you look at the list of winners, most of the MVPs who went through the regular draft were either top overall players or lottery picks. Agustin is an outlier by that metric, being the only MVP who was drafted in the second round of the 1989 PBA Draft. He wasn't even given regular minutes until his sophomore year, when he also won the 1991 Most Improved Player award before becoming the league's best player the following season.
Willie Miller (2002)
Miller is not a late-round Cinderella story like Agustin, but he arguably came closest to duplicating the Rookie-MVP feat of Paras. The 2001 top pick went on to grab the MVP award in just his second season in 2002, helping the Batang Red Bull Thunder defend their PBA Commissioner's Cup title that season. Miller would surprisingly get traded to the Talk 'N Text Phone Pals just two years after his MVP season, but that's a different story altogether.
The next MVP
Will Scottie Thompson secure a back-to-back MVP awards? Is it going to be another JMF year? Will there be a new name added to the list?
All of these questions will be answered on Sunday.
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(MDB)