While much of the focus of the NBA’s new awards voting process has been placed on the 65-game requirement, another significant change begins this year in the form of the league’s All-NBA teams now being positionless.
To say that Bill Simmons wasn’t a fan of the move when it was first announced last year would be an understatement.
“I detest it,” Simmons said of the change. “My whole goal with this awards stuff is it should be a snapshot of the season… this seems to be the most reactive to Twitter and Reddit of anything the NBA has ever done… my thing with these teams is that it should at least somewhat look like a basketball team.”
But now that it’s coming time actually vote on the awards fr0m an All-NBA perspective, the Sports Guy is reversing course.
On Monday’s episode of The Bill Simmons Podcast, Simmons and Ryen Russillo discussed their All-NBA projections heading into the final week of the regular season. And when it came to his third team, The Ringer founder actually found the ability to vote positionless useful, despite his previous objections to the premise.
“I’m going to cheat a little and probably put LeBron [James] as my ‘center,'” Simmons said. “If they’re going to go positionless, which I was like, ‘I’m doing positions.’ But I just don’t think [Domantas] Sabonis has been one of the best 15 players in the league.
Simmons seems to want to have his cake and eat it too.
If you want to exclude Sabonis from your third-team in favor of non-centers such as James, Paul George or Jaylen Brown, that’s certainly justified, but it’s also only made possible by the positionless voting. If you want to reward the league’s best 15 players, as Simmons seems to do, then the reality is that that such flexibility — which he complained about a year ago — isn’t just useful, but also necessary.
There’s nothing wrong with Simmons adapting to the new rules; let the first sports personality who is 100 percent consistent in his takes cast the first stone. But it might be time to admit that “Twitter and Reddit” aren’t the only supporters of positionless voting.
