NBA Rookie Survey

I know this is pretty old, but a few polls were taken amongst the new crop of NBA rookies at their Rookie Symposium a few weeks ago. The forty-four rookies were asked questions like “Who will win Rookie of the Year?” “Who is the most underrated rookie?” etc. The answers were startling, well, at least some of them were.

As for the obvious ones, the battle was clearly between Kevin Durant and Greg Oden. Turns out it wasn’t much of a battle as Durant was voted most likely to win the Rookie of the year and also predicted to play in the most All-Star games. Durant won the ROY vote 23-5 vs Oden out of a possible 44 votes. Pretty surprising numbers.

Now to the moderate surprises; can someone please explain to me the difference between voting someone most NBA-ready and voting someone to win the Rookie of the Year? I don’t understand that, but what I do understand is that Al Horford is the shit and received the praise of his peers by beating out Oden and Durant for the title of most ready. Horford and his chiseled 6’10” 244-lb frame benched 185lbs 20 times, the most of anyone at the NBA's pre-draft combine. Judging by those numbers, Horford is, literally, infinitely stronger than Kevin Durant. On the negative side I will say this, Horford’s shimmy is clearly not NBA-ready, but he has the potential to steal the shimmy title from Antoine Walker in the near future; hopefully force won’t be necessary.

The oddest votes were cast for the question, “Which current NBA player are you most looking forward to playing against?” Kobe Bryant won fairly easy, but scanning the “also receiving votes section” revealed an underlying fear amongst a couple of this year’s NBA rookies. Most voted for superstars like Bryant, Shaq, Tim Duncan, etc, but two decided they’d most like to play against JJ Redick and Quinton Ross. Who wouldn’t? They're pieces of shit. Redick can’t play defense, and is a great candidate to be posterized; but an explanation for his pick could be that a bitter North Carolina guy just wants another piece of him. Quinton Ross makes even less sense, he may just be the most mediocre player in the league. His career numbers are stunningly average, 20 min/game, 5pts, 1 asts, 2 rebs. The college rivalry factor, a la Redick, isn’t in play either, he went to Southern Methodist. There may have been another possibility of Tar Heel involvement, in an attack on Matt Doherty, but Ross did not get a chance to play for the former UNC coach.

To find any possible clue, I turned to google hoping for anything remarkable about Ross and there was literally only one link that wasn’t simply his career stats. That link was from InsideHoops.com who conducted probably the most boring interview in NBA history, here’s a snippet talking about Ross' time living in Europe:

InsideHoops.com: The first thing I think of about Belgium is chocolate.

Quinton Ross: They got some good chocolate over there.

InsideHoops.com: Have to eat it in moderation.

Quinton Ross: Yeah, you got to. But it's pretty good, though.

That’s about the most interesting thing about Quinton Ross, he thinks chocolate is pretty good and eats it in moderation. My only guesses on the culprit of this Quinton Ross choice are Spencer Hawes or Greg Oden. Hawes’ love of chocolate was ingrained into his soul at the University of Washington which requires their student athletes to drink chocolate milk after practice. Oden may have done it to show respect to his new teammate Sergio “Spanish Chocolate” Rodriguez who has had a beef with Ross’ Belgium chocolate preference for sometime now. Sadly, we may never know the answer to this riddle.

NBA Rookie Survey