Kevin O’Connor had a mea culpa to deliver this week.
The Yahoo Sports senior NBA analyst took to his podcast, The Kevin O’Connor Show, after the NBA’s release of its full voter ballots this week revealed he was the only voter among roughly 100 who didn’t have Jalen Brunson on any of the three All-NBA teams.
“I’m here to say I’m sorry to Knicks fans,” he said.
“I’m here to say I’m sorry, Knicks fans.”@KevinOConnor admits he made a mistake in leaving Jalen Brunson off of his All-NBA team 😅
(via The Kevin O’Connor Show) pic.twitter.com/fjAyzudPkp
— Ball Don’t Lie (@Balldontlie) May 28, 2026
His reasoning was that he viewed the third-team spot as a genuinely competitive four-way race among Brunson, Tyrese Maxey, Jalen Johnson, and Deni Avdija, and that when it came down to Brunson versus Maxey, defense was the deciding factor.
“Brunson obviously should be All-NBA, and that’s a mistake by me,” O’Connor admitted.
O’Connor also argued that the voting window needs to be extended. The 2026 results speak for themselves on that front, given that Jalen Duren collected Most Improved Player votes, Joe Mazzulla walked away with Coach of the Year, and Mike Brown, who has masterfully guided the Knicks to their first Finals appearance since 1999, somehow didn’t crack the top three in the balloting.
“Should we just be waiting until before the Finals to vote?” O’Connor asked. “Because Brunson should be first or second team All-NBA this year. And Mike Brown should be in a top three for Coach of the Year with the strings he’s pulled with the Knicks.”
O’Connor wasn’t the only voter fielding questions about his ballot this week. SiriusXM’s Justin Termine was the lone dissenter on Victor Wembanyama’s first-team selection, dropping him to the second team on the principled, if increasingly solitary, grounds that he votes strictly by position and considers Nikola Jokić the superior center during the regular season. Sportsnet’s Michael Grange had it considerably worse. He publicly declared he had voted Scottie Barnes onto the third team, the official ballots proved otherwise, and he deleted the offending post before eventually resurfacing with an explanation that he had genuinely forgotten what he submitted weeks earlier.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.