BiE supposes the only suspense with this award this year was how close things would get and who placed second. So, after the ho-hum announcement that Pau Gasol was chosen FIBA Europe Men’s Player of the Year for a second consecutive time, we today know the answers. In order, then: Not very close at all, and Dirk Nowitzki.
Nowitzki finished second in the final tabulation with a 0.078 rating against Gasol’s mark of 0.335; Milos Teodosic was third at 0.050. The public saw things a little differently than the experts, however, with Nowitzki just fourth in the popular vote, with The Dastardly One topped by Marcin Gortat (who finished 12th overall) and Erazem Lorbek (5th overall). Meanwhile, fourth-place overall finisher Vassilis Spanoulis got no respect from the voters, earning just enough ballots to place 14th with the crowd. (And you thought NBA All-Star Game voting was weird!)
Check out the final standings as per FIBA’s calculations, with the players’ finish in the popular vote for the award in parentheses following.
Gortat: The fans love him!
2. Dirk Nowitski (4)
3. Milos Teodosic (8)
4. Vassilis Spanoulis (14)
5. Erazem Lorbek (3)
6. Rudy Fernandez (9)
7. Juan Carlos Navarro (10)
8. Tony Parker (12)
9. Hedo Turkoglu (6)
10. Ersan Ilyasova (7)
11. Nikola Pekovic (13)
12. Marcin Gortat (2)
13. Novica Velickovic (5)
14. Ioannis Bouroussis (15)
15. Igor Rakocevic (11)
16. Lior Eliyahu (16)
And now the suspense may begin anew, but with the Los Angeles Lakers certainly on an inside track to the NBA Finals and Team Spain expected to go far in the FIBA Worlds. If Pau plays in the latter, surely the threepeat is inevitable…
Tags: Dirk Nowitski, Erazem Lorbek, Ersan Ilysova, FIBA, Hedo Turkoglu, Igor Rakocevic, Ioannis Bouroussis, Juan Carlos Navarro, Lior Eliyahu, Los Angeles Lakers, Marcin Gortat, Milos Teodosic, Novica Velickovic, Pau Gasol, Rudy Fernandez, Team Spain, Tony Parker, Vassilis Spanoulis
Here are the votes from the expert panel. IMHO the fan vote should not even be considered as it is done online and any IP can vote once a day. The expert panel vote is much more accurate to judge.
1. Pau Gasol – 433 votes
2. Dirk Nowitzki – 94 votes
3. Vassilis Spanoulis – 63 votes
4. Milos Teodosic – 60 votes
5. (tie) Erazem Lorbek – 48 votes
5. (tie) Rudy Fernandez – 48 votes
7. Juan Carlos Navarro – 46 votes
8. Tony Parker – 44 votes
9. Hedo Turkoglu – 31 votes
10. Nikola Pekovic – 24 votes
11. Ersan Ilyasova – 21 votes
12. Ioannis Bourousis – 12 votes
13. Novica Velickovic – 10 votes
14. Marcin Gortat 9 votes
15. Igor Rakocevic – 3 votes
@ Michael: So to what do you ultimately ascribe the massive fan voting for Marcin Gortat? Anti-Spain and/or anti-Lakers backlash? Admiration based on six games in Eurobasket? Or just a LOT of Polish fans voting repeatedly? That’s the real mystery of the fan voting to me…
Thanks for reading!
Cheers,
Os.
FIBA does the fan voting online and allows any IP to vote once a day. So if fans wanted to they can easily stuff the ballots. That is why Gortat had so many fan votes, despite being low in expert votes, and why Spanoulis was high in expert votes, but low in fan votes.
Apparently, some fans decided to give Gortat a lot of votes. It could easily be done to give any player on the list the most fan votes if some people wanted to do so.
[...] (One wonders who perfected the basketball ballot box-stuffing technique first: The Poles with FIBA voting or the Chinese with NBA All-Star voting. BiE will always think of Marcin Gortat as the Yao Ming of Europe…) [...]