Thoughts on 2015-16 NBA Most Valuable Player Award Voting
Fans of Oklahoma City Thunder, Cleveland Cavaliers and San Antonio Spurs, your local sports writers have disappointed you. These guys deserve all your scorn and petitions to be removed form ever covering your favourite team.
NBA players, by the nature of the game and their kind of backgrounds; care a lot about media narrative. Since the 1980–81 season, the award is decided by a panel of sportswriters and broadcasters throughout the United States and Canada. Each member of the voting panel casts a vote for first to fifth place selections. Curry has done some crazy stuff this year. Whether enabled by his team mates or not, it is remarkable. It is also the prerogative of the voters panel to decide the MVP.
At the same time, he definitely did not deserve MVP unanimously. Unanimous here means that there were no other players playing at that level. That, is an Insult for the other players who played well and this post is about them. This insult was packaged and hand-delivered by the team specific panel members who could not even put that one first place vote for the deserving players in teams they covered. These guys earn their livelihood through the sports fans of the markets who got cheated in the votes. Especially, three small markets with clear contenders for that one first place vote were let down by their writers who should be ashamed of what they have done. Instead of redundantly arguing the case for each player, I will keep this post short and link to their numbers this season. Tell me that they did not deserve even one first place vote.
Voter
|
Affiliation
|
Team
|
| Anthony Slater | The Oklahoman | Oklahoma City Thunder |
| Bill Land | Fox Sports Southwest | San Antonio Spurs |
| Bill Schoening | WOAI Radio | San Antonio Spurs |
| Brian Davis | Fox Sports Oklahoma | Oklahoma City Thunder |
| Fred McLeod | Fox Sports Ohio | Cleveland Cavaliers |
| Matt Pinto | WWLS / 98.1 | Oklahoma City Thunder |
| Mike Monroe | The Rivard Report | San Antonio Spurs |
NBA players, by the nature of the game and their kind of backgrounds; care a lot about media narrative. Since the 1980–81 season, the award is decided by a panel of sportswriters and broadcasters throughout the United States and Canada. Each member of the voting panel casts a vote for first to fifth place selections. Curry has done some crazy stuff this year. Whether enabled by his team mates or not, it is remarkable. It is also the prerogative of the voters panel to decide the MVP.
At the same time, he definitely did not deserve MVP unanimously. Unanimous here means that there were no other players playing at that level. That, is an Insult for the other players who played well and this post is about them. This insult was packaged and hand-delivered by the team specific panel members who could not even put that one first place vote for the deserving players in teams they covered. These guys earn their livelihood through the sports fans of the markets who got cheated in the votes. Especially, three small markets with clear contenders for that one first place vote were let down by their writers who should be ashamed of what they have done. Instead of redundantly arguing the case for each player, I will keep this post short and link to their numbers this season. Tell me that they did not deserve even one first place vote.
- Oklahoma City Thunder is one of the NBA's smallest markets; they have two players ignored by writers. Both Russell Westbrook and Kevin Durant deserved at least one first place vote James Harden left the team and thrived in Houston. Look for Kevin Durant to do something similar. The reason is not that the fans do not love them. It is because their local journalists ignored them. They should channel that frustration into defeating the warriors today rather than putting stress upon themselves to show up the mistakes of their local voters.
- Cleveland Cavaliers gets only one regional vote in this list. Even he does not recognize the contributions of LeBron James or anyone else in the team in getting this team into the playoffs as the first seed of the Eastern Conference. Looks like Fred McLeod is still sore about The Decision.
- San Antonio Spurs have been a model of consistency in a small market. All three of them choose to ignore Kawhi Leonard who has already started delivering on his multi-year deal.
NBA ensures representation to small market teams to ensure a sense of proportion and perspective to the media narrative and attention The biggest obstacle to a small market team isn't the size or money, it is media members like the ones called out above who do not do justice to their roles.
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