Players, Haters, Ball, and the Players' Choice Awards

Awards aren't worth the metal they're cast in. At their most useful, they provide a rough outline of a league's history and fodder for tiresome arguments, but even in that respect, they're not strictly necessary. Without the six MVPs between them, would anyone fail to recognize Larry Bird and Magic Johnson as the dominant players of their era?

As it stands, awards are primarily for listmongers and serial legacy evaluators, the kind of people who reduce a sport down to sets of letter grades and power rankings because they're unable to conceive of the games we watch as anything richer than a decades-long contest to determine Who Is Best. A barroom debate about the merits of James Harden and Steph Curry's respective seasons can be fun and edifying, but it's all banter and sophistry—someone who's lobbying too hard for one party over another in those conversations is someone you will want to stop talking to. Just because everything can be starred, rated, and indexed doesn't mean it needs to be.

If NBA players want to have their own peer-reviewed awards show, that's just grand. Perhaps Curry will win the NBA's MVP, Harden will win the union one, and they can make the trophies fight each other like action figures. The invention of the cut-rate-sounding Players' Choice Awards is a rhetorical move more than anything. We can't vote on this particular set of honors? Fine, we'll fabricate our own and vote on that shit. By renting out a VFW and distributing various plaques and statuettes to her constituents, NBPA executive director Michele Roberts is questioning the dubious validity of the NBA's awards, which are made to seem official and important but in fact reflect nothing more than the collected opinions of reporters and broadcasters. It's not Basketball Yahweh deciding who wins these things; it's Zach Lowe and Brian Windhorst and your city's slow-witted, homertastic color guy. There is not an omnipotent being among them.

Let's not make high-flown declarations here such as the PCAs are about power—if you find yourself sounding like a Tidal ad, stop talking—but the PCAs are about power, in their frivolous fashion. Their inception follows a recent trend of athletes ignoring, circumventing, and/or flipping double birds at the media. Marshawn Lynch refused to engage with Super Bowl reporters. Russ Westbrook served some poor slapdick at the Daily Oklahoman a Chief Keef hook. Kevin Durant backed up his teammate by telling reporters all about what they don't know.

These hostilities speak to a familiar, festering disdain among athletes with being prompted by inane, repetitive questions each day, but also to the somewhat recent realization by athletes that reporters are no longer their only conduit to the public. Almost every famous athlete has one or several social media accounts through which they communicate—or, anyway, disseminate various messages—directly to fans. The Players' Tribune pairs Blake Griffins and Steve Nashes with ghostwriters that craft open letters and essays for them. The Cauldron also features ostensibly athlete-penned content from time-to-time. With so many outlets at your disposal, if you're DeMarcus Cousins, you don't have to buddy up with a journalist in order to convince the world you're not the sourpuss thug that vice principal types say you are. You can call out some hemorrhoid on Instagram, and fans will love you for it.

This freedom of expression—and athletes' increasing awareness of it—scares the incompetent media members among us, the ones who serve little purpose beyond relaying boilerplate quotes from tired, towel-clad players who just want to go home. If Anthony Davis stops feeding your tape recorder and instead elects to distribute the straight, banal dope about how we played as a #team tonight via a string of tweets, what is the beat reporter to do? He's been rendered obsolete by a text box.

This development is why we can't expect the Players' Choice Awards to go over well among the reporting class. Even to the ones who don't have NBA ballots, it's an affront, a comment on their uselessness. As Roberts' memo demagogically attests: "No one knows better than you (the players) what it takes to shine." A certain sort of empiricist NBA writer won't brook this either. They'll scoff and tut themselves hoarse at the results. One shudders to imagine what stank foam the Colin Cowherds of the world will blast through their blowholes about this.

This is not to blithely say fuck the media, as if it were some awful monolith, or as if I were not also it. (Though much of it is indeed awful: belligerent, not nearly as bright as it thinks it is, loud, aggrieved, smug, and unpleasant.) There are folks out there doing terrific work. And besides, my bloggy maundering is media, too. I traffic in takes and hatchet jobs and speculation, same as a lot of people, although I hope this space is understood as one for extravagant shit-shooting, not clear-eyed insight. The discourse is already fat with so many ill-humored, quasi-Hitchensian, This Is the Way Things Are (Or Ought To Be) columns, and nearly all of them are wretched and insufferably haughty. It doesn't need the full weight of my righteousness on top.

This is why I am sanguine about players setting up a sort of shadow media, with their own communicative channels and their own awards. Not because Athlete Twitter isn't a snooze or because The Players' Tribune isn't cynical; both mostly are. But because athletes are demonstrating the any-idiot-can-do-this nature of what facile beat reporters consider to be a solemn and difficult duty, they're pricking the blimp-egoed arbiters of excellence with a pin. In seizing some of the power and agency to which they've always been entitled, they are exposing the unnecessity and flimsy authority of sports media's least worthy denizens. Whatever shakes up this system is definitionally positive. It can't possibly get much worse.