I can only speak for myself here, but I believe that the integrity of the NBA's various awards and honors such as MVP, DPOY, ROY, MIP, All-NBA selections, All-Star selections, etc. would be in a much better place if players were allowed to be the only ones voting on it. Not media, not fans, just the guys who lace up their shoes and compete. The guys who see other players' performances and their growth first-hand on a night-to-night basis.

Much is made of the biases that media members openly carry with them. Some fans argue to this day that Steph Curry becoming the first-ever unanimous regular season MVP was far too late and that it should have, at the very latest, been LeBron James in 2013. Similarly, all-star voting is an absolute joke. It's a popularity contest, which is evident by the fact that Lauri Markkanen, who is absolutely balling out of his mind and has played 38 of the Jazz's 41 games, is getting less than half as many votes as Andrew Wiggins, who's only played 22 of the Warriors' 41 games due to injury. On top of that, how in the world does Austin Reaves have almost 150,000 votes?

Imagine how much different the MVP conversations would be if we didn't have to hear speculation and changing opinions from media members on a game-to-game basis. Imagine if we could just play the season without the media choosing Luka one week, Jayson Tatum the next, Giannis after that, and then Jokic after that. I would love to just have the regular season go by and then know how the players feel once 82 games have been played.

If only players were allowed to vote on awards and who the best players in the league are, I think we'd have a better idea of what it truly looks like when the best are recognized and rewarded for their effort. When players' peers are the ones driving the narratives surrounding the game, we see how different it is. Even when you look at the way that players speak about the game and about other players on their own podcasts compared to the way writers and people who never played talk about it on daily television, the difference is night and day.

I don't know how others feel, but I believe that players voting would fix a lot of the issues we have surrounding media agendas and biases that plague basketball dialogue and that unfortunately mislead a lot of fans.

TLDR: Letting the media and fans be the ones deciding who wins things rather than the players is screwing up the legitimacy of awards and honors. Let the players do it so that fans and media and stop pushing their biased agendas.