Doug Gottlieb: “My critique of Maria Taylor is taken as 'misogynist'. It is NOT. I have the same opinion of my good friend Adam Zucker, who works for CBS covering SEC college basketball, and I don’t think he should be voting for the best college basketball player in the country. The difference between those awards and these awards, and I don’t think people know this, is the All-NBA teams affect players’ ability to get the supermax contracts, so this affects the guy’s wallet. This isn't voting for the All-Star Game. LeBron actually said as much without saying as much on Friday when he said ’16 people voted me MVP, that’s it??’ In other words, he’s like ‘who are these people, and why can’t they see all that we’ve accomplished this year, and all that I’ve sacrificed, and all that I have done for my team??’ It’s a really good point, and my point is that not only has she been covering the NBA for like eight months, she’s not even covering the NBA. She’s a studio host. It requires skill and it requires talent, and she’s good at it, but it does not require the ability to evaluate certain players... We have enough guys who are current/former players, current/former coaches, and current/former GM’s who should be deciding their own. Am I sexist? No, Doris Burke deserves a vote because she covers all the games. If you want to say ‘what’s the difference in their resumes?', Doris Burke played, like Maria played, she coached, Maria didn’t coach, and Doris Burke came up through the ranks and covered all these guys… I could be critical of Doris Burke if I wanted to, it’s not sexist… Sexism is if I were to not be critical of her vote, or how she obtained the vote because she’s a woman. THAT’S what sexism would be – treating her differently, and I’m not treating her any differently… We have to get to a place to where any time a white person says anything about a black person that it’s not automatically racist, and a man says something about a woman and it’s not automatically sexist. It’s just not." (Full Segment Above)
Listen to Doug Gottlieb discuss his Twitter spat with ESPN’s Maria Taylor over the weekend after Gottlieb and Taylor butted heads on social media because of a tweet Gottlieb made that questioned Taylor’s qualifications as an ‘All-NBA’ voter.
Taylor was blasted on social media and throughout the sport for not including Lakers forward Anthony Davis on the ballot any of her three All-NBA teams. Taylor was the only voter who left Davis off her three teams.
Davis’ vote total put him behind only Giannis Antetokounmpo, LeBron James, and James Harden in terms of ballot ‘points’, which made Taylor’s oversight even more egregious.
Taylor took to Twitter to admit that it was a ‘clear mistake’ that she didn’t include Davis, but the error was greatly magnified by the reality that inclusion on the three All-NBA teams affects players’ ability to earn ‘Supermax’ contracts. Ultimately, a gaffe like Taylor’s could have cost Davis ten of millions of dollars in future earnings.
Gottlieb says Taylor is ‘spread too thin’ with all her work across ESPN platforms to be a reliable and locked in All-NBA voter, and says as unbiased studio host whose main role is to act as an intermediary between the rest of the talent, Taylor doesn’t necessarily have a task that is heavily demanding towards analyzing the game, and thus might not be a qualified to vote on an award over a male or female whose job is to strictly study and evaluate game play.
Gottlieb says he believes he is echoing the same sentiment that LeBron James is concerning the voters of NBA awards in general, as LeBron questioned the legitimacy of the voters for awarding Giannis the league MVP in a landslide, saying he was ‘pissed off’ that he only got 16 first place votes out of 101.
James added ‘I don’t know how much we’re really watching the game of basketball.’
Check out the segment above as Gottlieb details why his critique of Taylor was warranted, and why it would have been ‘sexist’ if he simply stayed quiet on the issue because Taylor is a woman.
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