All-NBA voting is going to be one long, weird MVP ballot

Without positions, organizing principles around All-NBA ballots will be interesting.

Good morning. Let’s basketball.

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St. Matthew; Frans Hals; 1625

As a part of the NBA’s general player participating reform, the league also removed positional categories from the All-NBA team, which is a central honor by which eligibility for certain contract types are based. This reform is about a decade too late; before the days of Nikola Jokic and Joel Embiid forcing difficult decisions at the top of the ballot, we had Andre Drummond, DeAndre Jordan and Al Jefferson claiming All-NBA nods because of a dearth of centers. Ironic that part of the league’s obvious reasoning in eventually pulling the trigger on the change had to do with too many elite centers.

In any case, the new positionlessness of the All-NBA ballot basically turns it into a top-15 NBA MVP ballot, with a tweak. On the MVP ballot, each spot matters in comparison to the others. Putting Nikola Jokic No. 1 and Giannis Antetokounmpo No. 2 is an impactful choice — a crucial decision for each voter. On the All-NBA ballot, the decisions come between Nos. 5 and 6, and Nos. 10 and 11. You can lump your five top MVP candidates on first team All-NBA, then your next batch of top players on second team, and so on. On All-NBA, there is no difference between No. 2 and No. 3 — the vote counts the same. Calling someone your sixth best player is the same as calling them your 10th, in this exercise. But 10th and 11th make for a massive voting gap.

This is going to potentially lead to some interesting choices and ramifications.