Basketball On The Internet.

IT’S important for the NBL that 2013-14 Perth MVP James Ennis continues to shine at the NBA’s Summer League but he sure makes it hard for anyone NOT a Wildcats’ supporter to like him.

In a recent background piece on him at “SLAM” he again couldn’t help himself when asked about missing out on the league MVP award to Wollongong Hawks playmaker Rotnei Clarke.

“I think I got cheated,” he said.

“But it’s all good. It was politics.”

Say what?

He got “cheated”?

How so?

Coaches vote after every game so is he implying Wollongong’s erstwhile mentor Saint Gordon McLeod stacked the votes for his man?

Because, let’s face it, Clarke must have polled a few votes on the opposition coach’s voting to win the award.

So how was the “fix” in?

OK. Not actually cheated.

Then let’s try “politics”.

Does the young man understand what politics is?

Is it politics that made him a member of clearly the best team in the NBL in 2013-14?

Is it politics that as a result of being in the best team in the league, he is likely to drop votes to players such as Jermaine Beal, Damian Martin, Shawn Redhage … the list goes on?

Clarke would not have had as many teammates capable of robbing him of votes in a club which went 13-15 to sneak into the Final Four.

Once there, it summarily was despatched by Ennis’ 21-7 Wildcats, a much deeper team which is why it clearly was the best.

Ennis, though beaten for the Larry Sengstock Medal as Grand Final MVP by Beal, was Perth’s best player and, in my view, the league’s best player.

But “Most Valuable” does mean taking your team further than it should get and without Ennis, Perth would still have been in the playoffs.

Without Clarke, Wollongong might have been in the SEABL.

So there was no cheating.

There was no politics.

If the voting system is flawed – in 1988 when Hobart Tassie Devils import Joe Hurst won the MVP he clearly was the league’s most spectacular player but never its Most Valuable – then by all means, raise questions over the process.

But understand it first.

In the meantime, someone needs to send Ennis a dictionary so he can look up “politics”, then place it on the family mantelpiece, right next to the NBL All Star Five trophy he sent home to his mother after the Awards Night.

You know, the one he sent by sea-mail.