From Dan Le Batard in yesterday’s Miami Herald.

How much of this has to do with race?

A lot?

A little?

Or ”zero,” as Miami Heat president Pat Riley said before the little white guy beat the big black guy for MVP?

I don’t pretend to know these answers. There is no good way to do these measurements with science or math. And I, too, am tired of seeing racism thrown like a Molotov cocktail into discussions where racism doesn’t exist.

But don’t you have to ask these questions when confronted with something unprecedented?

Or do we just continue laughing and making noise at our playoff cocktail party while ignoring the pinkish elephant standing in the middle of the room in a Nash jersey?

No one who looks or plays like Steve Nash has ever been basketball’s MVP. Ever. In the history of the award, a tiny, one-dimensional point guard who plays no defense and averages fewer than 16 points a game never has won it. But Nash just stole Shaquille O’Neal’s trophy, even though O’Neal had much better numbers than Nash in just about every individual statistical measurement except assists, so it begs the question:

Is this as black and white as the boxscores that usually decide these things?

Nobody is suggesting voters made their selection while wearing Klan hoods. Today’s racism rarely is that overt. It tends to be hidden better than that, as it is with the NBA’s proposed age restriction, a rule that would ostensibly affect all creeds and colors but really affects only one.

Does that mean commissioner David Stern is racist? Of course not. But, in that age restriction, he is proposing something that basically affects only black people until the age of 20.

And you can see why blacks might see the prejudice in that, just like Jews might object if there was suddenly a $2,000 tax placed on all flights to Israel.

The rule might apply to everyone flying to Israel, but one group is more likely to see and feel the anti-Semitism in it more than others.

Does it mean that a prejudice exists? Maybe. Maybe not. There are usually other valid explanations, too. But if only one group feels it, it might as well exist. And that’s where this MVP discussion gets tricky:

Voters might have simply chosen Nash because he was different and the underdog. And being white is part of what made him those things.

Voters might also have chosen Nash because with the former Tottenham trialist running the floor, the Suns improved from a lottery team to the club with the NBA’s best regular season record, as Le Batard cites later in the same piece.