Count Michelle Beadle among the many current and former NBA award voters who are uncomfortable with the responsibility of deciding athletes’ future finances.
Discussing this year’s All-NBA selections Tuesday on FanDuel TV’s Run It Back, Beadle explained why, after casting a vote that would decide whether Jayson Tatum earned award escalators for his rookie-scale contract extension in 2020, she stopped participating altogether.
“The money thing is weird. I used to have a vote in this, and it always made me very, very uncomfortable,” Beadle said. “And I was like, ‘It should not be Michelle Beadle’s place to affect millions and millions of dollars for a man I don’t know,’ and so you kind of have to do the right thing there.”
. @MichelleDBeadle stopped voting for NBA awards because she didn’t want to mess up Jayson Tatum’s money 😱
“I used to have a vote…it always made me very uncomfortable…like, it should not be Michelle Beadle’s place to affect millions of dollars for a man I don’t know.” pic.twitter.com/HCXU9IXpDa
— Run It Back (@RunItBackFDTV) May 27, 2025
Since 2017, MVP and All-NBA voting by media has been used to determine whether players are eligible for “super-max” contracts. This also applies to players coming off their rookie contracts, also known as the “Derrick Rose Rule.”
This created an uncomfortable dynamic for many voters in which their subjective personal evaluations had a direct impact on players’ livelihoods. One high-profile example of an analyst declining a vote was Zach Lowe, who relinquished it after the 2022-23 season while still at ESPN.
Beadle is not alone in turning her nose up at the league for creating this new role for the media, and she likely won’t be the last.
