(Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images)
LeBron James has won pretty much everything in the NBA, and he’s now also added another international award to his trophy cabinet.
The legendary small forward left Paris with an Olympic gold medal and an Olympic MVP award, with the latter being slightly controversial.
Plenty of fans made a case for Stephen Curry to be more deserving of the award, as he saved Team USA in the semifinals before also exploding and knocking some huge shots down the stretch in the gold medal game.
Now, Brian Windhorst of ESPN has shed some more light on how things went down, and it was kind of fishy.
In the latest edition of The Hoops Collective, Windhorst revealed that the MVP was chosen by the media and an undisclosed list of ‘FIBA experts’ (Via ClutchPoints).
“I was told that it’s media voting, which the media could vote on, there was a QR code allegedly on the wall… They opened the voting during the semifinals.”
Brian Windhorst speaks on the Olympic MVP voting process on the Hoop Collective Podcast pic.twitter.com/vko75mOW0W
— ClutchPoints (@ClutchPoints) August 15, 2024
However, the voting actually opened before the actual final, and those with voting rights just had to scan a QR code on the wall.
Simply put, they could’ve chosen a player from a losing team to be the Olympic MVP.
LeBron was the most consistent player throughout the course of the tournament, but it was Stephen Curry as the one who saved the team twice when it mattered the most.
Nikola Jokic, on the other hand, led Serbia to the podium with little to no help while almost averaging a triple-double and logging almost the same numbers as James and Curry combined.
At the end of the day, it’s hard to argue that James isn’t deserving of any award, but this time, it seemed more like a popularity contest than anything else.
The post Brian Windhorst Reveals Surprising Details Of Olympics MVP Voting appeared first on The Cold Wire.