Kyrie Irving wins the NBA?s Rookie of the Year award (Ball Don't Lie) ...more ?
Cleveland Cavaliers guard Kyrie Irving has won the Rookie of the Year award. News of his honor broke on Monday, and on Tuesday he was handed the hardware in a press conference so early in the day that admitted coffee non-user and Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert was seen drinking a caffeinated product from a company that is owned by the man who sold the Seattle SuperSonics out of Seattle. That's not a shot at Gilbert, who opened a casino on Monday night and was presumably out late, but a gratuitous shot at Howard Schultz .
In other news, Twitter is full of gratuitous shots at the Rookie of the Year voting. Not because Irving took the award ? he was far and away the best rookie in basketball, and he should have earned unanimous first-place voting ? but because lesser lights like Josh Selby (who played for Memphis, if you somehow were not aware) received a third-place vote, and New York's Iman Shumpert received a first-place vote. Ridiculous picks, to anyone who was paying attention.
And because everything happens in real time in social media, whenever the award voting (which used to disappear without a trace in your local paper's transaction page) is released, NBA fans and writers take to Twitter to complain about some of the stranger votes, while calling for writers to publicly disclose their personal picks. And then other NBA fans and writers respond by taking light shots at those that are bordering on getting haughty at votes gone wrong. And nobody leaves happy, even though everyone is correct in their take. Except for whoever the hell gave Josh Selby a third-place vote.