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.

Larry Bird, Boston Celtics

1984 MVP – Boston beat Los Angeles, 4-3
1986 MVP – Boston beat Houston, 4-2

What he’s doing: Bird was named the NBA’s Executive of the Year this season as the president of basketball operations for the Indiana Pacers. He’s been on the job since 2003, and before that kept his word by limiting a coaching stint with the team to three years. He stepped aside in 2000, but not before his selection as NBA Coach of the Year in the 1997-98 season. Although he considered stepping down at the end of the current season, he decided to stay on to oversee a
young team on the rise. He lives part of the year in Florida, but maintain his business interest in Larry Bird’s Hotel and Restaurant in Terre Haute, Ind., where he starred at Indiana State University.

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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.”

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