Bill Simmons has confessed to the world his last-minute changes on a number of his end-of-season award voting.
Every year, he is always very methodical with his voting and brings fans along for the ride.
Over the past two weeks, that meant multiple long podcast episodes alongside working through each category before locking anything in.
But once the voting deadline passed, he admitted he didn’t exactly stick the landing. Between viral clips of his own takes, eligibility rulings and how the Play-In played out, Simmons ended up switching three of his picks – including MVP.
“I have a confession for you,” Simmons told Lowe on Sunday night’s episode of The Bill Simmons Podcast.
“On Tuesday, I did my award picks, and I did MVP. And I did this long thing about how I couldn’t believe I wasn’t voting for Joker (Nikola Jokic), and SGA (Shai Gilgeous-Alexander), and I was trying to be fair and rational about it. And SGA, they won four more games, and they were the 1-seed, and he was the best player in the league, and four straight 31-point seasons. But then I was like, ‘I just can’t believe I’m not voting for Joker.’
“We ran it, we cut it as a video. And I watched it on social media, and what I saw was a person who was confused and didn’t have a lot of conviction in his choice. And I was a little embarrassed by it. I was like, I’m doing gymnastics not to pick Jokic, who is the best player in the league and is the most-valuable-to-his-team player in the league. And instead, I’m doing these mental gymnastics because SGA’s on the best team and he’s f*cking awesome. And look, either guy could have been the MVP. Wemby (Victor Wembanyama) could have been the MVP.”
“I voted for Joker. I changed my pick,” Simmons said. “I did a La La Land–Moonlight. I changed my pick. I was like, ‘What am I doing? How can I not vote for Joker?’ And I feel not awesome about it, because I thought SGA had an awesome year, too. But I think Joker is the best guy in the league, and I think he means the most to his team.”
Later on, Simmons said he also flipped his Sixth Man of the Year vote, moving Keldon Johnson ahead of his original pick after watching Jaime Jaquez Jr. struggle in Miami’s Play-In loss.
“I had Jaquez over Keldon Johnson, but then Miami lost on Wednesday,” Simmons explained. “And I was just like, I’m going to have the Sixth Man of the Year from the team that couldn’t even get to the last round of the Play-In game? And I switched it. So that’s the league’s fault. They shouldn’t have had us vote before the Play-In games.”
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