The time of year when the NBA General Managers vote on a variety of topics leading into the new season has finally come around again. This season brings a few new answers from GMs that we haven’t seen before. The rise of some young players have been noted inside front offices around the league, and they all seem to be quite confident about Cleveland’s chances to win the championship.
Cleveland garnered the most attention when asked about who will win the championship by getting 53.6% of the GM votes, but they were also asked to rank the top four teams in each conference:
Now, the votes for the top four teams weren’t too surprising, and the voting for MVP wasn’t that farfetched either. 39.3% of the GMs voted for LeBron James to win MVP this coming season, but the next question is where things started to get interesting:
As you can see, last year, LeBron took home a lot of the votes, but the GMs can see the shifting landscape these days. Anthony Davis has been taking the league by storm and everyone around the league can’t help but take notice. I’m positive that if you asked fans this same exact question, most of them would have the same answer.
Another response from the GMs that I thought was interesting was their vote for the best point guards in the league:
First of all, after getting 71.4% of the votes last year, Chris Paul took a backseat to a skyrocketing Steph Curry after his MVP season. That means that last season, Curry could only have 29% at the most, but now he gathered over half of the votes after just one season. The second part of this response that I thought was very intriguing was the fact that Mike Conley received the fourth most votes. No one ever mentions Conley in their top point guard talks. Damian Lillard, John Wall, and Kyrie Irving, to just name a few, are often mentioned before Conley. It seems as though the GMs see the defense and all-around game of Conley as something that these other top tier floor-generals don’t have.
If you’d like to see the rest of the NBA GM survey, check it out here.
Last year’s survey is here.
