Two (Off The Field) Ideas The NBA Should Steal From Australian Football

Have you ever watched an Australian rules football match? If you haven’t, get on YouTube and fix that. It’s a sport, played almost exclusively in Australia (shocking, I know) that’s like a combination of basketball and soccer where you’re allowed to tackle. It’s amazing. Just search for something like “AFL best goals compilation” and settle in.

Now, why am I bringing this up, beyond spreading the good word about the most underrated sport in the world? Because I think there are things the NBA, my favorite sports league in the world, can learn from the AFL. I’m not talking about on the field play; I don’t think NBA players should be allowed to tackle, as much fun as that might be. But off the field, I think there are two things the AFL does to honor its best players during and after their careers that I’d like the NBA to adopt.

I’ll identify each of those two things in turn, propose how it could work for the NBA, and talk about why it’d be an improvement over the way things are currently done.

AFL Thing That The NBA Should Steal #1: The Brownlow Medal

What It Is: To steal directly from Wikipedia: “The Charles Brownlow Trophy, better known as the Brownlow Medal, is awarded to the “best and fairest” player in the Australian Football League during the home-and-away season, as determined by votes cast by the officiating field umpires after each game. It is the most prestigious award for individual players in the AFL.” In other words, it’s their version of the regular season MVP award, but rather than having a group of voters cast one ballot at the end of the season, votes are awarded after each individual game.

How It Could Work In The NBA: Adopt the Brownlow voting system for the regular season MVP award. After each game of the NBA regular season a panel of voters (I’ll address who this should be in a second) rank the top three players from the game, with MVP Points assigned on a 3–2–1 basis. You could also do a 5–3–1 points system, to give more credit to the player who was the best in each game; personally I’m indifferent. Then at the end of the regular season, the MVP Points are tallied for each player across every game, and the player with the most wins the award. Ties broken by most first place votes.

That leaves the question of who should do the voting. As mentioned above the AFL has the umpires in each game cast the votes. It certainly makes sense: the umpires are (nominally) unbiased, they know the game as well as anyone, and, more simply, they’re already at each game anyway, so there aren’t any other logistics that have to be worked out. I would probably be fine with this in the NBA, though I think it’s a fair question whether we can expect referees to pay attention to things like how well a player is executing the defensive scheme when they’re also trying to, you know, referee a game at the highest level.

The alternative would be to have media members assigned to each game as designated MVP voters. This would probably also work fine, though the voter pool would need to be expanded. You’ll want at least three voters assigned to each game, and considering that there are only 100 MVP voters and 1,230 regular season games, it’s asking a lot of your voters to carefully watch and evaluate 30+ games per season on top of their day jobs. Still, it seems like a simple enough fix: get a pool of 200–250 intelligent, well-informed media members, historians, former players and analysts, and assign them each 10 or 15 games throughout the season to watch and cast a vote on.

One final note: under the Brownlow’s rules, any player who has been suspended at any point that season is ineligible (the “fairest” part of “best and fairest”). Personally, I see no reason to bring that over for NBA MVP voting. Nikola Jokic would already be ineligible for the 2021–22 award since he got suspended after shoving Markieff Morris, which feels… kind of dumb. He’d be ineligible for MVP Points in the games he was suspended, which feels like enough punishment.

Why The NBA Should Steal It: The current NBA voting system — really, the voting system for pretty much every award in North American sports — asks voters to do something near-impossible: boil 1,230 regular season games, each involving 15–25 players, down to a list of the five most valuable players. Voters already can’t agree what “most valuable” means, so how are they supposed to know how to weight points scored against games played, against defense, against intangibles, against team success, against advanced stats, against narrative, against clutch performance, against supporting cast, against differences in schedule, against…?

Let’s use an example to illustrate the challenge. Here are four MVP candidates from last season. I want you to look at this information and, based on nothing else, rank them 1–4:

Player A: 2262 MP in 66 G; 27.7 Points, 8.0 Rebounds, 8.6 Assists on 58.7% True Shooting; 25.3 PER, 7.7 Win Shares, 5.0 VORP; Mediocre defense; 42–30 team record.

Player B: 1585 MP in 51 G; 28.5 -10.6 - 2.8 on 63.6% TS; 30.3 PER, 8.8 WS, 3.7 VORP; Elite defense; 49–23 team record.

Player C: 2398 MP in 67 G; 28.8–4.2–7.5 on 62.3% TS; 25.6 PER, 10.4 WS, 4.8 VORP; Bad defense; 42–30 team record.

Player D: 2199 MP in 70 G; 16.4–4.5–8.9 on 59.9% TS; 21.4 PER, 9.2 WS, 3.7 VORP; Very good defense; 51–21 team record.

Ok, it feels pretty close, right? I think you can make a fair argument to place the four in any order. Player B is the best per-minute (great scoring and efficiency, lots of rebounds, and the best defense) and his team won a lot, so some voters will overlook all the missed time (he played 15 games and about 700 minutes less than the next-lowest guy). But other voters will rule him out entirely, saying that the best ability is availability and an MVP can’t provide value when they’re on the bench. They might look at Player D instead: his raw stats are probably the weakest of the bunch, but he played the most games, he played good defense and his team won the most. Still other voters might say that teams win games, not players, and Players A and C were putting up more impressive numbers than Player D while also carrying much bigger minutes totals than Player B, offsetting whatever weaknesses they have on the defensive end.

Now for the big reveal: these four players are, in order, Luka Doncic, Joel Embiid, Damian Lillard and Chris Paul, listed with their numbers from the 2020–21 regular season. MVP voters looked at the above table, and thought it was no contest: Embiid finished second overall behind Nikola Jokic with 586 points, while Paul came in fifth with 139, followed by Doncic in sixth at 42 points and Lillard in seventh at 38 points.

Now, you might agree with the order the voters ultimately landed on. That isn’t the problem. The problem is that voters looked at those resumes, which are generally very comparable, and decided that Embiid was head-and-shoulders better than the others, and that Paul was comfortably better than Doncic and Lillard. I don’t think it’s at all that clear.

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The question, then, is why voters voted as they did. I think it comes down to two related factors: winning bias and the power of narrative. Let’s talk about winning bias first. Embiid and Paul were generally seen as the best players on teams that won the second- and third-most games in the league. That automatically gave them a head start over the rest of the field, as history shows that voters drift towards the best players on the best teams year after year. Russell Westbrook winning on a team that finished 5th in his conference was considered a major outlier. Doncic and Lillard, who finished fifth and sixth in the West, respectively, never had a chance.

Now, I won’t say that winning bias is wholly a bad thing. Basketball by its nature is a game where the best players can carry their teams to great heights, so the Sixers’ and Suns’ strong records are good evidence that their best players had excellent seasons. But the problem is that it obscures so much context: as great as Embiid and Paul were, they had better supporting talent and coaching, on the whole, than Doncic and Lillard. Why are we only giving serious consideration — for an individual award! — to players who happened to have good talent around them, while dismissing comparable players who didn’t?

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Now let’s talk about narrative. First up, Embiid. The issue here might be called anchoring bias: a narrative about who the MVP candidates are takes shape in the collective minds of voters early on in the season, and can remain set even if those players see their performance slip over the rest of the season. Embiid is a good example. He played 30 of the first 36 games of the 2020–21 season, averaging 30.2–11.6–3.3 on 64.8% TS, with the Sixers going 24–12. Then, from Game 37, Embiid misses 12 of the next 14 with an injury, and wasn’t quite the same when he got back. Overall, Embiid played only 21 of the final 36 games, averaging 26.0–9.1–2.2 on 62.0% TS, with the Sixers posting a 25–11 record.

So he missed a lot of time in the second half and wasn’t as good when he did play (but despite this his team continued chugging right along). I would argue that if the halves had been reversed — if he had started out injured and less effective, rounding into form as the year went along — Embiid wouldn’t have been seen as a serious MVP candidate. But since the narrative had formed that he was having a breakout year and had established himself as one of the dominant forces in the league, voters were more forgiving of his underperformance in the second half. First impressions are powerful, in life and in MVP voting.

Now let’s talk about Chris Paul. He benefited from a cousin of winning bias, what I’d call the turnaround bias: the Suns had missed the playoffs 10 years in a row before Paul got there, they finished second in the conference once he arrived, Paul was the only notable addition to their roster, therefore he deserves the credit for their sudden success. And to be clear: Paul DOES deserve plenty of credit for the Suns’ turnaround. He’s an incredible player, and adding incredible players to your team is a good way to break playoff droughts. But the problem is that A: this narrative discredits the improvements made by the other players on the Suns’ roster independent of Paul’s arrival, and B: it leads voters to credit Paul for things like “changing the organizational culture” and “bringing a winning mentality to Phoenix”, which are squishy and hard to quantify or prove.

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This is all a long-winded way of getting to this point: I think a more granular approach to voting on the MVP award can fix a lot of the issues that bedevil the current voting process. Under a Brownlow-style system, Embiid’s poor second half (by his standards) would be weighted equally to his great first half, punishing him fairly for missing time and seeing his output slip. Paul, meanwhile, wouldn’t be given extra credit for the Suns’ turnaround, but only for his performance in each individual game, just like everyone else.

Now obviously, changing the voting system won’t eliminate biases entirely. For example, I imagine voters will often to prefer to give their first place vote to someone from the winning team, while lots of voters will focus on who had the best box score stats while ignoring things like defense, and so on.

But it also makes a lot of improvements:

• It reduces the amount of data that voters have to consider. They are only evaluating the players on the court in that one game, directly against one another, rather than trying to evaluate 400+ players in completely different situations and contexts. “Player A outplayed Player B in this game so he gets my first-place vote” is much simpler than “let’s compare stats from 82 different games while subjectively weighing a dozen different factors”.
• It helps kill off weak narrative arguments like “if you swapped these two players, I think Team A would get worse while Team B would stay the same…” or “Player A is the best player in the league in my subjective opinion, so he should win the MVP even if he doesn’t have the best season”, or “when I think about this season in the future I’ll think of Player B first, so he should be MVP”.
• Related to the Embiid case above, voters won’t have to decide how much to punish players for missing time. If they miss a game, they’re ineligible for those MVP Points. Simple and uniform.
• It will create a real, genuine race where every game matters, rather than a metaphorical one. This will encourage the best players to play hard every night, because they know if they slack off it will cost them MVP Points.
• This would give players on non-contenders a better chance to finish high in the MVP voting. Even if your team isn’t that good, you can still rack up points if you’re the best guy on the floor most nights.
• This would create an invaluable historical record. Currently, MVP voting will tell you who voters thought were the best 5–10 players in a given season. But the new system can tell you who the best players were on a game by game basis, which will help fans in the future put current players into a more accurate context. Imagine being able to pull up a random season and see the top 50 in MVP Points. That will tell you exactly who mattered that year, which is useful in historical arguments and evaluating players as Hall of Fame candidates.

Speaking of the Hall of Fame…

AFL Thing That The NBA Should Steal #2: Hall Of Fame Legends

What It Is: To once again quote Wikipedia: “The Legends category is for those who are deemed to have had a significant impact on the game of Australian rules football… Being named a “Legend” of the Australian Football Hall of Fame is the highest honor that can be bestowed onto an Australian footballer.”

Essentially, this is a highly-select “inner circle” within the Hall of Fame. It is reserved for the best of the best, the Hall of Famers that other Hall of Famers look up to. Notably, the AFL Hall caps the number of Legends at a maximum of 10% of total inductees, to only recognize the most significant playing and coaching records.

How It Could Work In The NBA: Ok, so this wouldn’t be an “NBA thing”, per se, since the Pro Basketball Hall of Fame operates independently of the NBA and factors in contributions from college and international play as well as performance in the NBA. But the idea would be simple: create an honor above and beyond “Hall of Famer” to bestow on the most outstanding candidates. We can call them “Legends”, or “The Inner Circle”, or “The Pantheon”, to steal a Bill Simmons phrase. Whatever the title, it’s a way to separate the rank-and-file inductees from the greatest to ever do it.

For simplicity’s sake, I would limit the Legend designation to those who were inducted as Players (rather than as a Coach or as a Contributor), whose case is built entirely or primarily on their playing careers in the NBA (or its predecessor, the BAA) or the ABA. By my count, there are 139 inductees who meet these criteria (five of those — Vlade Divac, Toni Kukoc, Drazen Petrovic, Dino Radja, and Arvydas Sabonis — are arguably in because of their international careers, but they spent enough time in the NBA that we’ll include them). So if we stick with the AFL’s rule that only 10% of total inductees can qualify as Legends, that means we can select 14 current inductees for the honor.

So, who to pick? I imagine everyone will come up with a slightly different list depending on their personal criteria, but here is who I would go with, separated by what decade they are primarily associated with:

• 1940s/1950s: George Mikan
• 1960s: Wilt Chamberlain, Oscar Robertson, Bill Russell, Jerry West
• 1970s: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Julius Erving
• 1980s: Larry Bird, Magic Johnson
• 1990s: Michael Jordan, Hakeem Olajuwon
• 2000s: Kobe Bryant, Tim Duncan, Shaquille O’Neal

Erving is probably the last name to make the cut, but I wanted a second player from the 1970s, and it seems appropriate to honor the ABA by including its best-ever player. Apologies to Kevin Garnett, John Havlicek, and Karl Malone, among others. Looking forward, we’ll keep a seat warm for LeBron James (if he ever actually retires). Behind him, it looks like Stephen Curry and Kevin Durant will one day find their way in, with Giannis Antetokounmpo looming on the horizon 15 years or so down the road.

Why The NBA Should Steal It: The Naismith Hall of Fame has the same problem that all Hall of Fames do: it treats every inductee as if they’re equal, when you and I both know that they aren’t. Like, 2021 inductee Chris Webber had a great career, but treating him like he’s peers with Michael Jordan because he was finally able to get just enough votes to earn induction is just ridiculous, in my opinion. In my heart I’m very much a “small hall” person, who thinks that the Hall of Fame should be extremely selective about who it includes, and that letting in too many people dilutes the honor.

And I’m not trying to pick on Chris Webber here. He’s far from the least deserving inductee: if I was so inclined I could probably go through and point to at least 30 of the 139 inductees I mentioned above who, in my opinion, probably don’t deserve to be there. That would be a futile exercise, of course. Those men are in, and they aren’t ever going to be removed. And the Hall of Fame, given its opaque election process and its need to keep bringing in new inductees to stay in the headlines, probably isn’t going to suddenly raise its standards anytime soon.

So creating a “Legends” wing would be, effectively, a compromise: we can set the Legends apart from everyone else, to make the “small hall” folks like me happy, and then the Hall can induct new players without having to pretend they’re on the same level as Wilt Chamberlain. That way, when borderline candidates do get inducted we don’t have to worry about the Hall being excessively diluted. The Legends will remain a highly exclusive club, unaffected if someone like Mitch Richmond is let into the rank-and-file.

Is it imperfect? Yes; ideally the Hall of Fame would just stop letting in weak candidates. Would egos be hurt? Absolutely; I don’t imagine a competitor like Kevin Garnett would appreciate being left out of the Legends circle. But it gets us closer to where we want to be, toward a Hall that more appropriately honors the best to ever do it. And hey, it would give us NBA fans one more thing to argue about. Isn’t that what we all want, at the end of the day?