The allegation was made by a Miami, Fla. sportswriter: Shaquille O'Neal lost the NBA's most valuable player award because he's black and Steve Nash is white.

The Toronto Star's Dave Feschuk opines on the matter:

"How much of this has to do with race?" wrote the Miami Herald's Dan Le Batard, who, while he didn't claim to know the answer to the question, claimed "Nash stole (O'Neal's) trophy."

"No one who looks or plays like Steve Nash has ever been basketball's MVP," wrote Le Batard, who was apparently forgetting the white and short Bob Cousy, who won the trophy in 1958. "Nobody is suggesting voters made their selection while wearing Klan hoods. Today's racism rarely is that overt."

The column got smarter, cribbing from a section of Blink, the book by New Yorker journalist Malcolm Gladwell, which points to evidence of a subconscious racism that pervades society, the kind that, in the example Le Batard chose, leads Chicago car dealers to offer better deals to whites than to blacks.

Now, it's impossible to say whether a certain number of MVP voters, largely white men, gave Nash the nod, unconsciously or not, based on the colour of his skin. Maybe some did, and maybe some, suffering from some latent white man's guilt, thought Nash should be the MVP but gave their vote to the black guy. Who knows? Short of hurled epithets and burning crosses for evidence, how does the accuser of a crime of conscience get a conviction?

What we do know is that it's hard to argue a pattern of racist behaviour in MVP voting. O'Neal, the dominant player of the post-Michael Jordan era, owns one MVP trophy, so it says here he'd been shafted before he lost to Nash, each time by the supporters of an African-American MVP. You get the feeling O'Neal's dominance is simply taken for granted, like another hot day in Miami.

But take the case of Karl Malone and John Stockton, the retired Utah Jazz duo so inextricably linked they've got a joint write-up in the NBA Encyclopedia. In that instance, though Stockton's role as the pass-first point guard was arguably as vital to the success of his club as Malone's role as the high-scoring power forward, Stockton never even got an MVP sniff. While the little white guy got one first-place vote in his career, Malone, the big black guy, won two MVP trophies. If there were voters with Klan hoods in their trunks, you'd think they would have made the case for Stockton.