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.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Milwaukee Bucks/Los Angeles Lakers

1971 MVP – Milwaukee beat the Baltimore Bullets, 4-0
1985 MVP – L.A. beat Boston, 4-2

What he’s doing: Abdul-Jabbar has come up short in his efforts to land an NBA coaching job, but this summer is will be tutoring Joakim Noah of the Chicago Bulls on how to be a more effective offensive player. Earlier this year, Abdul-Jabbar was appointed a US global cultural ambassador by US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, a role that he seems well suited for since he is a writer, historian, and filmmaker. In March, he and coauthor Raymond Obstfeld released their latest collaborative effort, – “What Color is My World?” – a children’s book about African-American inventors. Abdul-Jabbar, by the way, is the only player named MVP of the NBA Finals to have done so wearing the uniforms of two different teams, the Milwaukee Bucks and the Los Angeles Lakers.

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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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