The results from Tim Bontemps’ final 2025-26 NBA MVP straw poll over at ESPN are in, and though the race between Oklahoma City Thunder guard Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and San Antonio Spurs big man Victor Wembanyama appears to be as close as it ever has been, Gilgeous-Alexander actually won it in what looks like a walk. SGA took nearly 90% of respondents’ (who are likely MVP voters themselves) first-place votes and appears set to nab his second straight MVP award.
You may look at the 88-8 disparity in
first-place votes between those two and think, “What a blowout — the voters think he’s that much better than Wemby? Surely, it’s more of a 60-40 or 55-45 kind of race this year.”
It’s important to read the context as well as the results, though, both in the two-man race at the top of the MVP balloting and in the two-man race that has become the Rookie of the Year vote among media members this year. Because we have a similar result in Bomtemps’ Rookie of the Year straw poll, and it’s not one that many Dallas Mavericks fans are going to be happy with.
Kon Knueppel won the Rookie of the Year ESPN straw poll among the 100 media members asked who they have at the top of their Rookie of the Year ballot, getting 80 of the 100 possible first-place votes to Cooper Flagg’s 20. But that does not mean that the disparity is that wide, so cool your jets if they’re firing loud.
In a two-man race, if all 100 voters think it’s a close race, but Gilgeous-Alexander is just slightly ahead of Wembanyama at this point, and Knueppel is just slightly ahead of Flagg at this point, both of those two are going to win the poll, 100-0.
“When this is a binary choice, it doesn’t matter if you think it’s 60-40 for one guy,” Bontemps said on Friday morning’s episode of the Hoop Collective podcast, where he and fellow ESPN analysts Brian Windhorst and Tim MacMahon discussed the straw poll results. “If you think it’s 60-40 for one guy, and the majority thinks it’s 60-40 for one guy, the voting is not going to be 60-40. It’s going to be like 80-20, which is about where this is. It’s not like a ranked-choice scale where you can get percentage points for being close. You’re either first, or you’re second. You either win or you lose, and all fans look at it this way.”
Kon Knueppel is leading the entire NBA in 3-pointers made this season with 261 entering play on Friday. He’s shooting better than 43% from distance this year, something we haven’t seen from a rookie since Stephen Curry. His Charlotte Hornets are suddenly relevant, which is an unexpected point in his favor this year. Team relevance usually doesn’t play a role in Rookie of the Year voting, but the Hornets’ case this year is unique. The fact that Knueppel was on an absolute heater during the stretch of games that Flagg missed in February with a sprained foot, and Flagg’s slow start out of the gate after coming back from that injury also works against Flagg in the poll results.
Flagg has been great, and in 95 out of 100 years, his rookie stat line of 20.3 points (better than Knueppel), 6.6 rebounds (more than Knueppel) and 4.5 assists (more than Knueppel) would be good enough to win Rookie of the Year. Since the NBA-ABA merger, he’s just the fourth rookie to average more than 20 points, more than six rebounds and more than four assists per game as a rookie, after Larry Bird, Michael Jordan and Luka Dončic all did it in their first years. The one knock on Flagg’s game is that he hasn’t been a good jump-shooter across his rookie campaign. He’s shooting just 27.8% from 3-point range this year and
“For [Flagg] not to be Rookie of the Year was going to require something pretty historic was going to have to happen,” Bomtemps said on Hoop Collective. “And, not only has Knueppel set the 3-point record for a rookie in the NBA, he’s currently leading all players in the NBA in [3-pointers made], he’s shooting 43% from 3-point range on crazy high volume. And on top of that he’s been the driving force, if not one of the driving forces, on the remarkable turnaround job in Charlotte.”
He called the Rookie of the Year straw poll result “pretty expected” under those circumstances, though I don’t expect Mavs fans to agree with them. It should be noted, though, that Windhorst was one of Flagg’s 20 first-place votes in the straw poll.
“It’s a perfectly defensible vote if you want to vote for him,” Bontemps said on the podcast. “He’s having an awesome season.”
