The NBA Needs To Overhaul Its All-NBA Voting System

For the second straight season, Philadelphia 76ers center Joel Embiid finished as the runner-up in the NBA’s Most Valuable Player race behind Denver Nuggets center Nikola Jokic. And for the second straight season, Embiid was left off the All-NBA first team entirely.

On Tuesday, the NBA announced that Jokic, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Jayson Tatum, Devin Booker and Luka Doncic had been selected to the All-NBA first team, while Embiid, Ja Morant, Kevin Durant, Stephen Curry and DeMar DeRozan comprise the All-NBA second team. Embiid got more first-team votes than Tatum (57 to 49) and more overall voting points (414 to 390), but Tatum got the first-team nod solely because of the position he plays.

Under the current system, voters select two guards, two forwards and one center for each of the three All-NBA teams, “choosing players at the position they play regularly.” If a player receives votes at multiple positions—some are listed as guard/forward or forward/center—they get “slotted at the position at which they received the most voting points.”

Given the financial ramifications of All-NBA selections, the league and the National Basketball Players Association need to revisit the structure of the ballot during their upcoming collective bargaining agreement negotiations.

The current CBA places a cap on a player’s maximum salary based on how many years of NBA experience they have. Players with 0-6 years of experience can earn up to 25 percent of the salary cap in the first year of a new contract, players with 7-9 of experience can earn up to 30 percent, and players with 10 or more years of experience can earn up to 35 percent.

However, teams are allowed to give players larger extensions if they make an All-NBA team in the season preceding their new deal or both of the two prior seasons. Players coming off their rookie-scale contracts can earn up to 30 percent of the salary cap rather than 25 percent, while players with 7-9 years of experience can earn up to 35 percent (the so-called “supermax”) rather than 30 percent.

Falling to the All-NBA second team won’t affect Embiid’s earning potential. He already signed a four-year, $196 million max extension last summer, so he’s locked in under contract through 2026-27.

However, others haven’t been so lucky in recent years. Tatum missed the All-NBA team in 2020-21, which locked his five-year max extension in at $163 million instead of $195.6 million.

Tatum sounded off on that to former NBA guard JJ Redick on The Old Man and the Three podcast back in February.

“The only time I let it affect me, I remember last year it was in the playoffs—the playoffs might’ve been over—and everybody was coming out with their All-NBA ballots and podcasts and who they were voting for,” Tatum told Redick. “I had $30 million on the line to make it. I specifically remember one person saying, ‘I’m not a fan of his shot selection, so I just couldn’t put him on my All-NBA ballot.’ And I was like, I was baffled. … The fact that somebody can have that thought and basically cost someone $30 million. Forget about me, say the next rookie extension guys that come in, I think that has to change.”

Tatum didn’t call out the structure of the All-NBA ballot, but he should have a gripe with that, too. After all, he earned more total voting points (69) than third-team guard Kyrie Irving (61), but he missed out on an All-NBA spot—and therefore lost $32 million—because he plays forward rather than guard.

While Tatum is an extreme recent example of how the All-NBA voting system can cost a player tens of millions of dollars, he likely won’t be the last one if the current structure remains in place. As the NBA becomes increasingly positionless, it will become progressively more difficult to assign a positional label to certain players.

Ben Simmons, who’s listed as 6’11” on NBA.com, made the All-NBA third team as a guard in 2019-20. He’s three inches taller than Tatum (6’8″) and the same height as Antetokounmpo, the two first-team All-NBA forwards from this season. In 2019-20, both Khris Middleton (82 points) and Embiid (79) had more total voting points than both Simmons (61) and Russell Westbrook (56), but those two snuck onto the All-NBA third team because they were guards, while both Middleton and Embiid missed out entirely.

The 2018-19 season was the last time when the top 15 vote-getters all made the All-NBA teams and no player on the second or third team got more points than someone on a higher team. We’ve now had three straight years with at least one player getting snubbed to some degree—including Tatum losing out on $32 million—because of the NBA’s positional requirements for voters.

As more anomalous players such as Simmons and Doncic begin trickling into the league, forcing voters to apply outdated positional designations to their All-NBA ballots could become increasingly costly. Why not just let voters disregard positions entirely and choose their top 15 players even if they skew guard- or forward-heavy?

If the five best players in the NBA all play the same position in a given year, shouldn’t the All-NBA first team reflect that? How does it make sense for Embiid to finish as the MVP runner-up in back-to-back years—which, by definition, implies he was the second-best player in both seasons—yet finish on the All-NBA second-team both years?

This is by no means the most important problem for the league and the players association to address in CBA negotiations, but it does seem like low-hanging fruit. What’s the counterargument to scrapping positional designations on All-NBA ballots entirely? Particularly if adhering to them could cost a deserving player tens of millions of dollars?

If the players can’t convince the league to modify the structure of the All-NBA ballots, they’ll only have themselves to blame the next time a Tatum- or Embiid-esque situation arises.

Unless otherwise noted, all stats via NBA.com, PBPStats, Cleaning the Glass or Basketball Reference. All salary information via Spotrac. All odds via FanDuel Sportsbook.