That's one solution. As chaotic as this might seem I rather see this than to leave it up to 100% media.
i'd also have media rotate (maybe 300 members, voting every 3 years), it's so stupid for someone to think "oh i voted for jokic last season, i should vote for someone else this season". Every season is independent of every other, and should be evaluated only for their performance during that season
The players voted for MVP through 1980, so it is possible. I haven't gone back to see how good a job they did, but looking at how current players are doing on all-star game voting... In 2022, 297 players got at least one peer vote to start the All-Star game, including Zylan Cheatham, Jay Huff, Moses Wright, Robert White, Mckinley Wright IV, Joel Ayayi, and George King. One of these guys I made up, and there is probably a 0% chance most people actually know which player it was without guessing. https://www.seattletimes.com/sports/nba/analysis-nba-all-star-voting-by-players-again-was-flawed/ Maybe this drops a bit if you prevent guys from voting for teammates, but I generally prefer keeping it in the hands of the media, but requiring them to make their vote public so they are held accountable.
Voting for an all-star game is a bit different than the most prestigious individual award in your profession/league though. Sure you rank the candidates in an MVP voting but it only goes to 5th place and only 1 guy takes the hardware home. All-Star voting has at least twice as many and the "award"/recognition isn't only given to one guy.
I still believe that the vast majority of players would not take voting all that seriously. Ironically, the players who probably would care the most about a specific player being recognized for MVP would be the candidate's teammates, who would be barred from voting for them. And you'd end up with a very weird situation where the only way Embiid's teammates could legally support him would be to intentionally leave off Jokic and any other serious contender off their ballot entirely to ensure that they got the least number of points possible. So you'd have a pretty bad environment where most players don't care, and those who are most engaged should be voting strategically and not actually honoring the players who deserve it. Not even going to go into the potential issues with player agencies coordinating votes for clients, which I definitely think would be heavily incentivized. I still believe the best environment is to have the voters own their ballots and make them public. At the end of the day, you might strongly disagree with Bill Simmons' logic, or how much he is actually following the game, but at least he explains his choices, and is willing to stand on them.
I get it - you don't like Gobert - but don't apply logic to him that you don't then apply to everyone else. Marcus Smart is about as limited offensively as Gobert if not MORE because he is not a great ball handler and he can't guard bigs like Embid or Jokic yet you were talking about how deserving he was earlier. He literally single handedly killed his team's chances to win last night not one or two times, but 3 times in the last minute(screwing up the rebound, getting blocked, getting the ball stolen). You think it's ANY coincidence that he was the guy that Milwaukee wanted to get the ball? Who is getting exposed now?
What applies to gobert doesn’t apply to smart And no the recency bias from last night doesn’t change that. If you’re going to use that silly bias I’ll go to game 4 where smart closed out the bucks
You don't think players and coaches are biased too? And we have seen how poorly players judge the value of other players. I've never put much stock in these awards anyway. It's narrative driven, one way or another, no matter who the voters are. People shouldn't put too much emotional investment in these things.
