NBPA announces the Players Choice Awards

Nearly three months after the Oklahoma City Thunder star [Kevin Durant] voiced his opinion that NBA players should vote on the league's regular season awards instead of the media, first-year National Basketball Players Association executive director Michele Roberts issued an internal memo announcing the "2015 Players Choice Awards."

The memo, which was obtained by USA TODAY Sports, stated that anonymous votes will be cast and the winners will be announced at a summer meeting in Las Vegas. The media has voted on NBA awards since the 1980-81 season.

Stephen Curry has also spoken about how players should get a say in awards voting. More from Amick:

Golden State Warriors point guard Stephen Curry, an MVP candidate, shared his view on the voting situation in a mid-March interview on The Dan Patrick Show as well, saying that players should be given part of the MVP vote.

"I think (players) should have a portion of the vote," Curry told Patrick. "Obviously we're the ones playing against each other. We know who's having the best year, who's doing things that really stand out. So I think that should be a part of the vote, for sure."

In the end, separate awards seems to make sense. If you include media and player votes for the same award, it's somewhat impossible to know how to weigh each of those votes. Should the media get 75 percent of the vote and the players 25? Should that reverse? Should they split it down the middle?

There's no scientific answer to any of those questions. No one can be right or wrong. In some ways, it would lead to more nonsensical MVP debates than we already have. Two awards, though, allows a variety of perspectives.

Players are both more and less qualified to vote for awards than media members. On the one hand, they understand the intricacies of basketball more than your average writer or broadcaster, not necessarily from an Xs-and-Os standpoint but certainly from a cultural one. Maybe they'll grasp the value of a true locker-room leader more. Or maybe they'll realize why Russell Westbrook's singular worth is more important than anyone else's purely because of how sore he leaves point guard defenders for the next game. 

At the same time, media members don't have the personal allegiances players might. Sure, we'll see homer votes every once in a while, and we'll even see some voters play fast and loose with their drop-down menus, like the ones who accidentally voted for Jordan Crawford instead of Jamal Crawford for Sixth Man of the Year a few seasons back. But for the most part, media members can remove emotion from a situation more than players if only because they're trained to do so. If a player is buddies with Stephen Curry or doesn't like James Harden, what does he have to lose by being swung in a particular direction? Ask that same question about a writer or broadcaster, and the answer becomes "his or her professional integrity."

Either way, two separate awards will bring an interesting and different viewpoint without diluting the ones we already have. There doesn't seem any reason to be against this.