In the 2019-20 NBA season, a year with pretty clear-cut winners for the league’s top awards, there was surprisingly more controversy than usual with the media vote.
Even LeBron James voiced his issues with this year’s voting, questioning how he could have received just 16 out of 101 first-place votes in this year’s MVP race.
🤣🤣16 out of 101 🗳! Ok cool! I got y’all.
— LeBron James (@KingJames) September 19, 2020
Ja Morant was also none too pleased with one reporter for voting Zion Williamson as Rookie of the Year, costing Morant the chance to become the unanimous winner of the award this campaign.
— Ja Morant (@JaMorant) September 19, 2020
JJ Redick also took umbrage with Jrue Holiday not making either one of this season’s All-Defensive teams:
When it’s nearly unanimous amongst your peers that you are the best defensive guard in the league and you don’t make either All-Defense team…that’s a snub. @Jrue_Holiday11
— JJ Redick (@jj_redick) September 9, 2020
Other questionable issues with this year’s end-of-season award voting: One ballot left Anthony Davis entirely off of all three All-NBA teams, while another gave Andre Drummond a vote for 2nd Team All-NBA and Zach LaVine one for 3rd Team All-NBA.
Regardless, these outliers are basically an annual occurrence and are, for the most part, aberrations. There’s usually a lot of agreement in the votes, not just this year but always, as we were able to prove in our latest research.
We looked up the data on votes for individual awards since they first became available, and the large majority gets the winner right most of the time.
Check it out for yourself in the following chart:
