2023-24 RealGM All-Season Awards Voting Thread (voting completed)

[Texas Chuck]

Pretending like there was no strategic voting, attempts to manipulate through the "discussion" serves none of us. We need to always call that nonsense out. It's always been a problem on this board unfortunately, but this year was particularly egregious. Some posters are too attached to specific players and a need to manipulate results. Beyond pointless and yet....

Its why I participate in the discussion but never the voting.

I saw all of one “egregious” voting post… and I am positive that vote was not counted.

Talk about player attachment when, as it has been for months, almost all the whining is from people evidently too attached to a player to tolerate others criticising him.

Nope. If you think those defending that Jokic is not just a regular season player were more of a problem than those making that claim because his team lost a series he played well in.....

That's not whining. That's pushing back against an agenda. I'm no Jokic fan, but the cherry picking of data and narrative spinning against him were absurd.

But at least the manipulation attempts fell short this year.

[Colbinii]

Pretending like there was no strategic voting, attempts to manipulate through the "discussion" serves none of us. We need to always call that nonsense out. It's always been a problem on this board unfortunately, but this year was particularly egregious. Some posters are too attached to specific players and a need to manipulate results. Beyond pointless and yet....

Its why I participate in the discussion but never the voting.

I saw all of one “egregious” voting post… and I am positive that vote was not counted.

Talk about player attachment when, as it has been for months, almost all the whining is from people evidently too attached to a player to tolerate others criticising him.

Nope. If you think those defending that Jokic is not just a regular season player were more of a problem than those making that claim because his team lost a series he played well in.....

That's not whining. That's pushing back against an agenda. I'm no Jokic fan, but the cherry picking of data and narrative spinning against him were absurd.

But at least the manipulation attempts fell short this year.

This wasn't nearly as bad as the 2017 RealGM Top 100 Project and Ardee openly admitting during discourse his goal for the project was to get Kobe ahead of Garnett.

At the end of the day we all have biases and present those biases in various degrees.

[AEnigma]

Pretending like there was no strategic voting, attempts to manipulate through the "discussion" serves none of us. We need to always call that nonsense out. It's always been a problem on this board unfortunately, but this year was particularly egregious. Some posters are too attached to specific players and a need to manipulate results. Beyond pointless and yet....

Its why I participate in the discussion but never the voting.

I saw all of one “egregious” voting post… and I am positive that vote was not counted.

Talk about player attachment when, as it has been for months, almost all the whining is from people evidently too attached to a player to tolerate others criticising him.

Nope. If you think those defending that Jokic is not just a regular season player were more of a problem than those making that claim because his team lost a series he played well in.....

That's not whining. That's pushing back against an agenda. I'm no Jokic fan, but the cherry picking of data and narrative spinning against him were absurd.

Narrative-spinning like pretending anyone argued Jokic was “just a regular season player”… a year after winning a title?

Maybe if you cared to characterise positions honestly, you would stop seeing it as a “manipulation”. Explanations were given time and time again, yet engagement with them was minimal. And “cherry-picking data” is a particularly egregious claim when it was Jokic voters who seemed willing to use any number they could find to advance a preexisting stance.

[Texas Chuck]

At the end of the day we all have biases and present those biases in various degrees.

No question. Which is why I have always tried to be as transparent as I can about my own. Biases are whatever. I love JJ Barea, Doc likes non-helio offenses, 70s fan likes big men, whatever. All fine. Pulling an ardee or what happened this year for those trying to keep Jokic from winning at all costs...lame.

[AEnigma]

You know what, Chuck, let me know what everyone’s ballots should have been, so next time rather than explaining stances for ourselves, we can just submit the list you want and save ourselves the trouble.

[therealbig3]

To be fair, I haven’t read everything, but I’m not aware of some narrative spinning or agenda against Jokic. I feel like the criticisms were quite fair actually, and that Jokic actually doesn’t get criticized nearly to the same extent in general as previous “BITW” players (LeBron is obviously under a microscope at all times, but even when guys like Durant and Giannis and Curry were at the forefront of the conversation, they got much more broken down than Jokic). He’s amazing and fantastic, but criticism as long as it’s fair and consistent should be welcomed. Don’t think it held anyone back from giving him his flowers (as evidenced by the vote), and even those that were critical of him rank him as a top 5-10 peak IIRC when I asked that question. Doesn’t sound like some agenda against Jokic, just placing him accurately amongst the legends he’s being compared to.

My super honest opinion is that he’s been essentially untouchable because he was labeled essentially god’s gift to basketball, like Curry before him, playing the game it should be played based on some arbitrary mindset, and so any and all criticism got silenced. But then very real flaws got exposed and when they get talked about, the critics get called haters with an agenda. Meh.

Yeah there are those that take it too far and try to act like he was never that great, or he absolutely doesn’t belong in conversations he clearly does belong in, but those aren’t people that really had any bearing in these threads, so who cares? There’s always people like that, but there was no large scale push imo. He still pretty easily ran away with POY and OPOY (and I voted him #1 for both but I can acknowledge the critiques were fair from what I read…unibro had him outside the top 5 IIRC, but his actual reasoning was consistent and made sense…if you’re low on his defense and feel that his offense isn’t as dominant as the numbers say, then yeah, Jokic is gonna drop on your list, reasonably so).

[Colbinii]

At the end of the day we all have biases and present those biases in various degrees.

No question. Which is why I have always tried to be as transparent as I can about my own. Biases are whatever. I love JJ Barea, Doc likes non-helio offenses, 70s fan likes big men, whatever. All fine. Pulling an ardee or what happened this year for those trying to keep Jokic from winning at all costs...lame.

I guess I don't see this as an issue this go round. I don't think anyone was actively trying to get Jokic to lose. I think people were passionate about the flaws and lack of impact they saw in Jokic some people also tended to be both forthcoming with their opinion and abrasive in discourse.

Seems like a big nothingburger compared to how some of the voting panels have been in the past but it's important to bring it to light as a cautionary tale.

[therealbig3]

lol I mean, even those that were highly critical of him typically voted him #2 or #3, still contributing to his overall POY win. And the guys that they took over him were either Luka or Shai or Tatum. Either great two way players on better teams or someone with the same kind of impact profile who took his team further this year.

This is really not the hill to die on guys.

[Colbinii]

Just to be clear and getting the cat out of the bag...OhayoKD voted Jokic #1 last year. He said it should be unanimous for him to be #1. This isn't some Kobe-stan dumping on KG or Dirk.

1. Jokic
He was the best regular season player. He also completed a three-year stretch where had a better argument for being the best player every single one of those seasons than nearly anyone(and yes that includes any 3-year stretch for Jordan or Lebron). The only players in history I think may have had a comparably good argument are Bird, Kareem, and Russell. He destroyed 1-year impact-witnqlw like wowy, lineup-splits, extended wowy, ect(note that RAPM and APM-derivatives are less useful differentiating between 1-year peaks), and those sorts of numbers remain nigh-unprecedented when you make adjustments like taking out Jamal. Taken at face-value that 1-year rs portfolio looks better than anything that's available for the likes of Magic, Bird, or Jordan and right up-there with the likes of 2016 Steph, non-09/10 Lebron, and 03 Duncan. He also played significantly more than either of the other MVP-candidates and coasted to end the season because the Nuggets secured the 1-seed extremely early. Note that his best-teammate looks pretty pedestrian over a substantial when we flip things.

In the postseason the Nuggets went 16-4 posting point-differentials of +8.8, +8.9, +6, and +8.1 with their worst performance coming against a Lakers side that decisively clamped the champs. If you were to use the rs/off as I tend to do(sample-size) and attribute the playoff-improvement to Jokic(more on that later), there are a handful of players who've posted years that look comparable. I do not think he is especially advantaged in terms of fit(I consider the 2019 Raptors and Kawhi, Draymond/Steph, and Pippen/Jordan, Lebron/Bubble AD more exceptional in that regard) and even with weaker competition(like pretty much every team that was similarly dominant), the Nuggets were properly great.

Jokic is also a goat-tier offensive player with the only players i'd entertain as more valauble era-relative on that end being Oscar, Magic, Lebron, Nash, and Mikan. He is a truly do-it-all-scorer(someone like Durant can see their scoring suffer greatly when they have to function as a secondary ball-handler) who is good from pretty much every spot on the court on good to great volume. He is an all-time tough-shot-maker, an all-time post scorer, an all-time mid-range talent, an elite inside-guy, and might just be the best pure passing talent in league history. He also is one of the smartest players ever and like a Lebron, Nash, or Magic has impact that goes beyond what you can physically see him do(and thus should get some of the credit for his teammates improvement). His only weakness here is ball-handling(and it's not so easy to "push-pace"), but for a center he is absolutely exceptional there(and a matchup nightmare even for an all-time versatile defensive big like davis).

Jokic's defense held-up alot better in the playoffs than I thought and though he faced a fairly favorable set of positional matchups, it's notable his defense was outright good in the finals and against a certain Anthony Davis(albeit an injured one).

No one was as good and I would hope he would go down as a unanimous #1 here. He should have gone down as the first B2B2B MVP in nearly 30-years.

[lessthanjake]

In theory, strategic voting should cancel out, and therefore not really affect the bottom line overall. But that’s not necessarily the case with relatively small numbers of votes—where one side of things can just have more strategic voters.

And here I do think we can look at the breakdown of where Jokic voters put Luka and where Luka voters put Jokic and see a pretty big difference. Using the 10-7-5-3-1 point framework that Doc uses, the average points that Jokic voters gave to Luka was 5.6, while the average points that Luka voters gave to Jokic was 3.6 (or 3.0 if Shaq Attac’s vote were actually counted). Most Luka voters put Jokic outside of the top 3, while 90% of Jokic voters still put Luka in the top 3. Of course, this may reflect actual genuine beliefs, where Jokic voters are legitimately higher on Luka than vice versa. And it’s true that some explanation was given (though one can give an explanation for anything…apparently including Tyrese Haliburton over Nikola Jokic). But it seems like a red flag, especially with some of the people put above Jokic. And it does feel like the red flags were pretty unilateral in terms of what direction they came from this year.

Ultimately, to the extent there was unilateral anti-Jokic strategic voting, it ultimately didn’t really matter, since Jokic won anyways. But I think it definitely illustrates the risk that strategic voting can affect the outcome. As of about halfway through the voting period (and when like all of the Luka-#1-and-Jokic-much-lower ballots were already in), I had tallied up the vote totals and Jokic actually was barely behind Luka. Some Jokic votes came in after that that resulted in Jokic winning, but it was actually plausible that this probably-unilateral-strategic-voting stuff could determine the outcome. And I guess the trouble with that is that the incentive that creates is mostly just for other people to make sure the strategic voting is not unilateral. At that point, with everyone strategic voting, perhaps the outcome actually ends up close to what it should be if no one was doing strategic voting, but it does limit the worth of the whole thing, and would make it kind of just become an arms’ race of tanking the biggest competition to your preferred guy.

[eminence]

Embiid over Jokic is an unjustifiable vote imo, but that's just my opinion and voters are allowed to vote how they will somewhat within reason (qualified voters) - and I'm sure many feel that way about my own Tatum #1 pick, seeing as he only got one other top 3 vote.

I don't see notable gaming this season, and we've certainly seen more ridiculous votes (no Warriors top 5 in '17 stands out in my memory).

I dunno, seems fine to me.

[mikejames23]

Well, Congrats to Jokic. I think the West is stacked and there's a arms race going on between teams. I see LAL, LAC, and GSW headed out of this one, but there's still a ton of competition for Jokic IMO. It won't be easy going for Denver.

Gobert, Wemby, Maxey and Reid - well good job to these guys too and Maxey is a fun guy to watch. Wemby is headed straight to the all time great list. Gobert badly needs to win a title or he'll get old. Reid performed really well in his 6th man role.

Daigneualt and Stevens - Well good **** to both of these guys. I def. saw Stevens winning championships in his career, and that time's finally here for him.

[eminence]

lol I mean, even those that were highly critical of him typically voted him #2 or #3, still contributing to his overall POY win. And the guys that they took over him were either Luka or Shai or Tatum. Either great two way players on better teams or someone with the same kind of impact profile who took his team further this year.

This is really not the hill to die on guys.

Brunson/Embiid also got 1 vote each over Jokic.

Oh, and I mentally blocked UniBros ballot...

[lessthanjake]

lol I mean, even those that were highly critical of him typically voted him #2 or #3, still contributing to his overall POY win. And the guys that they took over him were either Luka or Shai or Tatum. Either great two way players on better teams or someone with the same kind of impact profile who took his team further this year.

This is really not the hill to die on guys.

Actually, most people who voted for Luka #1 did *not* have Jokic in their top 3. And that included stuff like Embiid, Brunson, and *Haliburton* above Jokic.

[AEnigma]

^ Love that five-ballot sample size.

The reality is if those of us who preferred Luka/Shai really wanted Jokic to lose, we would have left him off the ballot. Only one accepted ballot did that, but it provided one of the most thorough explanations why. It seems like people want to pretend this is a best player ranking; it is not (although depending on the voter, it is also not not that).

When the best player wins the title, we expect a unanimous result. When they do not, that opens the door to disagreement — and I would expect that disagreement to become more common and more pronounced the less relevant they are to the season’s outcome (and Jokic is one of the two to seven least seasonally relevant winners in the project’s history).

[therealbig3]

lol I mean, even those that were highly critical of him typically voted him #2 or #3, still contributing to his overall POY win. And the guys that they took over him were either Luka or Shai or Tatum. Either great two way players on better teams or someone with the same kind of impact profile who took his team further this year.

This is really not the hill to die on guys.

Brunson/Embiid also got 1 vote each over Jokic.

Oh, and I mentally blocked UniBros ballot...

I mean you’re always gonna get some minority opinions, that’s what I like about RealGM PC Board tbh, and actually reading the explanations, I don’t see an active campaign against Jokic…just legitimate concerns about his defense (and offense for that matter) and a lot of love for the people ahead of him. May not make perfect sense to most, but it’s a legitimate opinion that they’ve at least somewhat backed up. They didn’t go around campaigning for certain players over another, they gave their thought process and their vote. And OhayoKD was the one who voted for Jokic #1 the year prior who had Embiid ahead of him this year. Doesn’t seem like someone with an agenda against Jokic, but from his rationale, admits that he’s more concerned about Jokic’s overall impact profile than before based on his playoff performance this year.

[therealbig3]

lol I mean, even those that were highly critical of him typically voted him #2 or #3, still contributing to his overall POY win. And the guys that they took over him were either Luka or Shai or Tatum. Either great two way players on better teams or someone with the same kind of impact profile who took his team further this year.

This is really not the hill to die on guys.

Actually, most people who voted for Luka #1 did *not* have Jokic in their top 3. And that included stuff like Embiid, Brunson, and *Haliburton* above Jokic.

A grand total of 3 people had Jokic outside of the top 3. “Most” is literally 3/5 people.

[Peregrine01]

lol I mean, even those that were highly critical of him typically voted him #2 or #3, still contributing to his overall POY win. And the guys that they took over him were either Luka or Shai or Tatum. Either great two way players on better teams or someone with the same kind of impact profile who took his team further this year.

This is really not the hill to die on guys.

Brunson/Embiid also got 1 vote each over Jokic.

Oh, and I mentally blocked UniBros ballot...

I mean you’re always gonna get some minority opinions, that’s what I like about RealGM PC Board tbh, and actually reading the explanations, I don’t see an active campaign against Jokic…just legitimate concerns about his defense (and offense for that matter) and a lot of love for the people ahead of him. May not make perfect sense to most, but it’s a legitimate opinion that they’ve at least somewhat backed up. They didn’t go around campaigning for certain players over another, they gave their thought process and their vote. And OhayoKD was the one who voted for Jokic #1 the year prior who had Embiid ahead of him this year. Doesn’t seem like someone with an agenda against Jokic, but from his rationale, admits that he’s more concerned about Jokic’s overall impact profile than before based on his playoff performance this year.

I don't think it's the voting, it was the discourse that got pretty ugly. You got a bunch of posters here whose sole goal in life it seems is to produce a gotcha post against someone they disagree with. So the discourse further dug people into their positions and became even more of potshot throwing contest.

[lessthanjake]

lol I mean, even those that were highly critical of him typically voted him #2 or #3, still contributing to his overall POY win. And the guys that they took over him were either Luka or Shai or Tatum. Either great two way players on better teams or someone with the same kind of impact profile who took his team further this year.

This is really not the hill to die on guys.

Actually, most people who voted for Luka #1 did *not* have Jokic in their top 3. And that included stuff like Embiid, Brunson, and *Haliburton* above Jokic.

A grand total of 3 people had Jokic outside of the top 3. “Most” is literally 3/5 people.

Yes, the number of people voting in this at all is small and the number who were against the guy who won is obviously going to be even smaller. Luckily, I was responding to a statement you made specifically about what that small group of people “typically” did. Responding to me by saying that that’s a small number of people is not a valid retort at all. (Not to mention that 3 people isn’t really a small amount in the context of something only like 17 people voted in—that’s a significant percent of the votes!). I’d also mention that it was really 4 people—it’s just that one pretty clear strategic vote wasn’t counted.

[AEnigma]

He said most who did not vote for Jokic voted him top 3, and you disagreed because most (3/5) Luka voters did not. And you want to say he has an issue making valid retorts?