Retired NBA Finals MVPs: What are they doing now?

The Most Valuable Player in the NBA Finals is an award that's only been around since 1969. Find out what retired Finals MVPs are doing today.

Isiah Thomas, Detroit Pistons

1990 MVP – Detroit beat Portland, 4-1

What he’s doing: Thomas was fired in April as men’s basketball coach at Florida International University after three seasons in which the Golden Panthers went 26-65. Prior to that he held coaching and executive jobs with the New York Knicks, Indiana Pacers, Toronto Raptors, and Continental Basketball Association. During a stormy tenure with the Knicks, a female executive of the club brought a sexual harassment lawsuit against Thomas, who was president of basketball operations. The suit was settled out of court for $11.5 million.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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