Warriors fans,
I understand why you are frustrated by the team’s snubs in the early returns for NBA awards. I just want to ask you to follow one rule:
Avoid caring about NBA awards until we know that the voters actually care about their responsibility.
Jabari Young, who works for CSN Northwest after previously working for outlets in San Antonio and Philadelphia, got some attention today after admitting that he forgot to include Draymond Green on his Defensive Player of the Year ballot. In his words, Mr. Young “completely ignored” Draymond as a candidate for that award and All-Defense team consideration. While completely blanking on a pivotal player on the league’s best defense raises plenty of doubts, Mr. Young posting the rest of his choices made me even more skeptical of his engagement with the league as a whole.
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In an even more egregious move than admitting that he forgot Draymond Green, Mr. Young did not include Andrew Bogut at all in either his All-Defense selections or players mistakenly omitted. In the interest of full disclosure, I chose Bogut as my DPOY over at RealGM and ended up choosing Kawhi Leonard second over Draymond. Ignoring the keystones of the league’s best defensive team defies all explanation, much less one that damning.
The larger problem that affected the voting beyond a single person’s mistake was a general lack of effort among the voters as a whole. Mr. Young and 31 others picked DeAndre Jordan as the top defender in the league this season. Mr. Jordan and the Clippers finished 15th in Defensive Efficiency this season, a tenth of a point per 100 possessions away from being in the bottom half of the league. We all know that the Clippers’ bench was a spontaneously combustible dumpster fire this season and that should help DeAndre’s case. However, Clippers opponents actually scored more points (103.1 vs. 102.8) at a better eFG% (55.1% vs. 48.7%) when Jordan was on the floor. If any of you are thinking that there could be some other factor that led to this discrepancy, the top five Clippers in minutes played when Jordan sat (per NBAwowy) were Spencer Hawes, Jamal Crawford, Glen Davis, Hedo Turkoglu and Austin Rivers.
Many of Jordan’s advocates pointed to his blocked shots and rebounds. While DAJ does get a ton of blocks, they come at a price because he contests substantially fewer shots than many Centers and opponents shot a respectable 48.5% at the rim against him. The Nylon Calculus developed a tool that estimates Rim Protection Value using contest rate and rim field goal percentage allowed and Jordan finished 40th. Fortieth.
Let me repeat: THIRTY-TWO of the league’s 129 voters (almost a quarter!) chose a Center on a middling defensive team that did a better job stopping opponents when he was off the floor as the single best defender in the league.
I generally take solace in the fact that these awards do not matter much in the grand scope of things but in a few circumstances they really do. As reported at the time by the intrepid Tim Kawakami, Andrew Bogut has huge contract incentives for finishing on the 1st, 2nd or 3rd All-NBA team or 1st or 2nd team All-Defense. Bogut gets a 15% bonus for doing so and playing 65+ games (as he did this year) but finished behind Jordan and Rudy Gobert in the DPOY voting so he may not get All-Defense either.
One of my favorite quotes is generally attributed to Marie von Ebner-Eschenback reads “We are so vain that we even care for the opinion of those we don’t care for.” Until the NBA chooses a block of voters who pay attention to the whole league and care about the responsibility they have been chosen for, try not to let it bother you.