May 4, 2015; Oakland, CA, USA; Golden State Warriors guard Stephen Curry with the 2014-2015 NBA Most Valuable Player trophy at the Oakland Convention Center. Credit: Kelley L Cox-USA TODAY Sports
East coast bias. As a kid I always wondered why my teams weren’t on my sport shows. Searching SportsCenter’s rundown in hopes of finding an upcoming Bay Area story was my daily treasure hunt. If a national broadcast featured a segment on a local athlete it felt like a second Halloween. As I slowly matured into adolescence I began to accept this media bias; advertising dollars drive sports and advertisers pay for the east coast audience. My experience isn’t unique. For Bay Area sports fans, accepting that their team won’t frequent ESPN’s “Block A” segment very often is like getting your driver’s license or going to prom – it’s a rite of passage.
-== 5 Reasons Why the Warriors Will Beat the Grizzlies ==-
But I can tolerate this media bias. The beauty of Twitter, Youtube, etc, is that modern platforms specialize in customizing to your personal liking. The Warriors receiving one-tenth the amount of coverage as the Knicks or Bulls becomes insignificant when I can follow revel in my Warriors bubble on Twitter or Youtube.
What I can’t tolerate is the possibility of east coast media bias affecting voting on NBA Awards I unapologetically care way too much about. As the NBA Awards have been revealed these past two weeks, a question has percolated within me. Does the location of the media outlet a voter’s affiliated with, have an impact on who they vote for? In an ideal world it shouldn’t. Right? 130 votes are tabulated per award. If you have the privilege of casting a vote, your NBA knowledge should extend farther than your own geographic location -farther than perhaps your own east coast media bias.
So, that’s what I ventured to uncover. Is there a media bias rooted in geography? To quantify this I aggregated all the votes for 6th Man of the Year, Coach of the Year, Defensive Player of the Year, and MVP, and assigned a location to each vote based on the media outlet the voter was affiliated with. The locations I assigned were northeast, south, midwest, southwest, west, and national -for writers covering the entire league. As with any statistical analysis there are outliers, but with a sample size of 130 votes per award this data is strong. This is the story of that data.
6th Man of the Year: Won by Lou Williams
I’ve always found 6th Man to be a funny award. It’s like saying, “this guy was the very best at getting demoted”. With that said, I’ve got to start somewhere with this analysis; here are some interesting notes on the voting for the NBA’s best bench player.
Out of the 37 ballots allotted to the southern and northeastern regions combined, Andre Iguodala only 
appeared on six: one in 1st place, one in 2nd, and four in 3rd. But, measuring any of this by ballot appearances is a flawed approach. This vote is about points: a 1st place vote is worth 5 points, a 2nd place vote is worth 3, and 3rd place is worth 1. When examined in this context it’s calculated that of the 333 points the south and northeast combined for, Iggy only received 12. That’s 4% (rounded up!). Iguodala’s plus-minus was more than double the amount of the next best Warriors bench-player, he helped shepherd the league’s best defense, he played closing minutes for one of the NBA’s best regular season teams ever, and a mere 4% of the vote is what the northeastern and southern media outlets deem fitting. That’s highly questionable.
Toronto’s Lou Williams and Boston’s Isaiah Thomas absolutely dominated voting in the northeast. These heat-check guards combined for 90% of the northeast’s 1st place votes, and 75% of the 2nd place votes.
Bill Wennington, the color commentator for the Chicago Bulls, voted Mo Speights for 6th Man of the Year. Long live Mo Buckets.
Coach of the Year (COY): Won by Mike Budenholzer
It’s hard to have qualms about Atlanta’s Mike Budenholzer beating Steve Kerr for Coach of the Year.
In my opinion Kerr’s 16 win improvement culminating in an all-time incredible plus-minus in the merciless Western Conference, is greater than a 22 win improvement in a conference where Boston’s team of NCAA all-stars made the playoffs, but I could be swayed. Budenholzer was indeed the man behind my favorite excerpt from an NBA article this season. In Lee Jenkins’ profile on the Atlanta Hawks he imparted this golden line, “He (Budenholzer) went to a Drake concert with small forward DeMarre Carroll”. Buds is officially my 2nd favorite NBA coach.
Breaking down the COY vote feels like breaking down a presidential election. Budenholzer commanded the northeast winning 65% of 1st place votes there, while Kerr compensated with less sizable victories in the southwest, south, and midwest regions. Intriguingly, Budenholzer lost his home region -the south- to Kerr by 10% in 1st place votes, and Kerr only tied in 1st place votes in his home region -the west. The turning point for Budenholzer was voters affiliated with national media outlets; Buds won 59% of votes from national outlets, while Kerr only won 30%.
While 6th Man of the Year demonstrated sizable east-coast bias, it’s impossible to infer that from Coach of the Year.
Defensive Player of the Year (DPOY): Won by Kawhi Leonard
*Warriors fans immediately start pacing around the room.*
I was going to attempt to make a transition into talking about the travesty that was this year’s DPOY
voting, but instead I’ll just quote from the first two lines of every speaker that appeared in Key & Peele’s “Black Republicans” parody video: “I’m pissed. I’m royally pissed”.
Kawhi Leonard’s incredible. Bill Simmons has it right when he calls him an octopus. The man combines a 7’3” wingspan (!) with lateral foot speed reminiscent of Scottie Pippen. He might be the NBA’s single best defender, but he wasn’t the DPOY; yes, there’s a difference. While Kawhi missed 18 games during the regular season, Draymond only missed two. 16 additional games of defensive value should be enough to end this debate, but I’ll proceed anyway. While Draymond’s Warriors were 1st in opponent field goal percentage, Kawhi’s Spurs were 13th. So how did Draymond lose this award? Well, there are two main factors…
- Voters in the northeast and south were oddly obsessed with DeAndre “when I come on the court my team’s defense gets worse” Jordan. DeAndre won more 1st place votes in the south and northeast then Draymond or Kawhi. When combining the northeast and south, DeAndre received 88 total points (using the point scale where a 1st place vote counts as 5, a 2nd place as 3, and so on), Kawhi received 77, and Draymond received 76.
- 42 voters left Draymond entirely off their ballots. Including one writer for whom Draymond “just slipped my mind”. You can read Warriors World’s own Danny Leroux address that lapse in memory here.
Once again the northeast and south emerge as the culprits of shortsighted voting.
MVP: Won by Wardell Stephen Curry II
Finally, justice in NBA Awards voting. In this sense, Steph Curry is somewhat of an exception in how the media biases operate. Many writers better than I, have and will articulate why this MVP was truly Curry’s. As such, I’ll simply leave you with some fun facts about the MVP voting.
- Curry won all of my assigned regions (national outlets too) in a landslide. Unsurprisingly, the closest region was the southwest where Curry received 8 / 13 votes (62%) and Harden received 4 / 13 (31%).
- Curry’s biggest landslide was the south where he won 89% of 1st place votes.
- In the category of perhaps the most prestigious writers, the national vote, Curry won 73% of 1st place votes.
In this article I could only include a small fraction of all the voting data I aggregated on location and NBA Awards voting. If you have any voting questions I left unanswered, shoot me an email at [email protected]; I’d love to share more of this data with you.