The ESPN Bontemps Straw Poll

How BS is it?

Every year since the 2019-20 season, ESPN has conducted a straw poll of likely NBA awards voters to get a sense of who’s leading the MVP race. Tim Bontemps, the creator of the straw poll, has been running these polls since 2017 when he was at The Washington Post. At first, the poll was published once a year but since joining ESPN, Bontemps has increased the frequency of his straw polls. For the last three seasons, he’s published three separate straw polls a year.

The first straw poll of the 2024-25 season was published on December 21st. The results showed that Nikola Jokic was the favorite to win the award, with Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Giannis Antetokounmpo trailing behind in second and third place, respectively.

However, Vegas isn’t exactly on the same page as Bontemps’ voters. In fact, Jokic’s odds of winning the award have actually gone down some since the straw poll was published.

Friend of The F5, Steph Noh, suggested I look into the predictive power of ESPN’s straw polls. So I did.

To do so, I looked through every ESPN straw poll from the past five seasons and matched the results with the actual end of season awards ballots.

The chart below shows where players ranked in the early season straw poll and where they finished in the actual MVP voting at the end of the season. The numbers inside the squares indicate how many times a player finished [1st/2nd/3rd/etc…] in the early season straw poll and [1st/2nd/3rd/etc…] in the actual MVP voting. With this chart we can see how often the results of the early season straw poll matched the results of the end of season awards.

If the early season straw poll is good at predicting where players will finish on the MVP ballot we should see a concentration of values in the top right of the chart.

Instead, we see a high concentration of values along the bottom and left borders, which indicates players that were Unranked (UR) in either the early season straw poll or the MVP ballot.

On this chart we can see that only one of the five winners of the early season straw poll went on to actually win the award. The others finished 4th, 8th, 13th, and Unranked (UR).

• Last season, Joel Embiid had a strong lead in the early season straw poll but finished the season Unranked because he was ineligible for awards due to games missed from injuries.

• In 2022-23, Jayson Tatum led all vote-getters in the early season straw poll before finishing fourth in actual MVP voting.

• In 2021-22, Stephen Curry received 94 out of a possible 100 first place votes in the early season straw poll. He would ultimately finish eighth in the actual MVP voting before winning his fourth NBA championship.

• In 2020-21, LeBron James was first in the early season straw poll but earned just a single fifth place MVP vote at the end of the year — good enough for 13th place.

You have to go all the way back to the 2019-20 season, the debut of the ESPN straw poll, to find a player who “won” the early season straw poll and the actual MVP award. That was the year Giannis Antetokounmpo took home his second MVP trophy.

To summarize the findings, “winning” the early season straw poll doesn’t mean much, which is probably why the Vegas odds haven’t tilted more in Jokic’s favors.

The best thing I can say about the early season straw poll is that the eventual MVP winners usually came from the top of the straw poll ballot. Nikola Jokic finished second, third, and fourth in the early straw poll in each season he won the MVP. Giannis, as we mentioned earlier, was the lead vote-getter in his early season straw poll before winning his second MVP. Only Joel Embiid finished outside the top five in the early straw poll of his MVP season.

So if there’s a takeaway to all this it’s that the top of the eventual MVP ballot has probably already been decided, but the order isn’t set.

Up until this point all I’ve done is look at the results of the early season straw poll compared to the end of season voting. But as we mentioned earlier, ESPN conducts three straw polls each season.

So, lets’s take a look at the predictive power of the mid- and end of season straw polls and compare it to the early season straw poll.

I’ve split the chart up into thirds to distinguish between the early, mid, and end of season straw polls. (In 2020 and 2021 ESPN only conducted two straw polls — one at the beginning of the season and one again at the end of the season.)

Unlike the early season straw polls, the mid- and end of season straw polls are clearly more predictive of the actual MVP ballot. In fact, the end of season straw poll in each of the past five seasons has correctly predicted the MVP and the MVP runner-up. Additionally, the eventual MVP winner has never finished lower than third in the mid-season straw poll.

The predictive power of these later season straw polls is even clearer when you look at the share of the maximum potential points each player received. In other words, how many points did a player receive as a percentage of the total possible points they could have received in the straw poll and awards voting (in a poll of a 100 voters, the maximum points a player could receive is 1,000 points because each first place vote is worth ten points).

This goes to show just how much more important it is in voters’ eyes to finish the season strong than to start the season strong. By the time we get to April, no one will remember stuff like how bad the Bucks were to start the year. But those early season struggles might have cost Giannis some imaginary straw poll votes in December.

If I was giving gambling advice based on these results, I’d suggest waiting until the mid-season straw poll to place any wagers. Until then, you can always put savings into a subscription to The F5.

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Sowing, Reaping, and Three-Point “Luck”

Not much to say here. There are lots of factors that explain why the Warriors started 12-4 and have gone 4-12 since. But it’s hard for me to ignore those three-point splits, both for the Warriors and their opponents.

The good news for Warriors fans is they probably aren’t as bad as their 4-12 record over their last 16 games. The bad news is that they probably aren’t that much better either.