When the NBA released the final tally for MVP voting, few had a problem with Joel Embiid winning the award. One item that did raise eyebrows, however, was the reveal that one voter left Denver Nuggets center Nikola Jokic out of their top five entirely.
On Thursday, the NBA revealed who the voter in question was, as the league released all the voter ballots for end-of-season award voting. It turns out that ESPN’s Mark Jackson was the lone MVP voter to omit Jokic.
The NBA’s data showed that Jackson voted for Embiid to win the award, but he rounded out his top five with Milwaukee’s Giannis Antetokounmpo, Boston’s Jayson Tatum, Oklahoma City’s Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, and Cleveland’s Donovan Mitchell.
Gilgeous-Alexander and Mitchell are not horrible choices, and Jackson was not the only one to include them. However, he was the only one to cast a vote for both of them, as Embiid, Antetokounmpo, Jokic, and Tatum made up four of the top five on 98 of the 100 ballots, with TNT’s Stan Van Gundy the lone voter to omit Tatum. Jackson was, not coincidentally, behind Tatum’s lone third-place vote as well.
Charles Barkley had some very harsh words for the voter who omitted Jokic, as he did not know who actually cast that ballot at the time. It will be interesting to see if Jackson offers any sort of explanation now that everyone knows it was him.
