When NBA awards voting was announced, one voter had left Anthony Davis entirely off of their All-NBA ballot. Today, with ballots being released publicly, we learned it was ESPN’s Maria Taylor. She immediately took to Twitter to note it was an accidental mistake on her part:

Considering Davis made the first team anyway, it’s hard to look at it as anything that consequential. And considering the week Taylor has had, dealing with the fallout from a gross, sexist comment about her appearance that led to Chicago radio host Dan McNeil getting fired, you’d think people would have been inclined to let this one go. Sure, Laker fans on Twitter were going to get their stupidity in, but when it came to people actually in media, it hardly seemed worth mentioning.

Enter Doug Gottlieb.

Taylor, understandably given her week, wasn’t having it:

Players like Donovan Mitchell and other members of the media agreed:

https://twitter.com/ThisIsJMichael/status/1307440128445554694

Gottlieb, meanwhile, decided to double down while also insisting he wasn’t being sexist and that it was instead about ethics in NBA awards voting, or something.

https://twitter.com/GottliebShow/status/1307414359950336000

It should be noted that Taylor played college basketball at Georgia, which apparently isn’t enough for Doug. It’s almost like he’s making a disingenuous point for the sake of getting attention! Let’s see if there are any other clues that’s what’s happening…ah, yes:

Gottlieb also attempted to hit Taylor over the Anthony Davis thing, which again, was clearly not a conscious thing. (And the rest of her ballot was totally fine, too.)

Here’s perhaps the crux of Gottlieb’s attempted point, which he continued to attempt to make:

The problem with that, of course, is that it’s incredibly difficult for a woman to get a job as an analyst covering the NBA. Gottlieb’s plan would essentially take awards votes away from all but Doris Burke and Candace Parker, and there weren’t that many women voting to begin with. A less diverse array of voices is never a good thing, but that’s what he apparently wants.

If you want to have a debate about the media voting on NBA awards, especially considering how All-NBA status and other awards have potentially huge contract implications for players and teams, that’s certainly a discussion worth having. But that’s not the discussion Gottlieb wants to have. Unfortunately for him, the conversation he ended up getting wasn’t the one he wanted either. There was never a good time for him to try to make this point this way, but this week of all weeks?

Not smart.

About Jay Rigdon

Jay is a columnist at Awful Announcing. He is not a strong swimmer. He is probably talking to a dog in a silly voice at this very moment.