Ryan Anderson won this year’s Most Improved Player Award and Greg Monroe of the Pistons finished fourth. Here are the results, via NBA.com:
Monroe finished tied with Andrew Bynum of the Lakers. One theory out there about Monroe inexplicably getting a Defensive Player of the Year third place vote is that a writer may have mixed up his ballots and accidentally voted for Monroe on DPOY rather than Most Improved. If that was indeed the case (and we’re still trying to figure out who gave him that vote), that one vote would’ve given Monroe fourth place by himself.
As far as the Most Improved voting itself, I wouldn’t have picked Anderson simply because he was already close to this good last season, it must’ve just taken the majority of voters an extra season to notice he can play. In the TrueHoop Network awards, I voted James Harden first, Nikola Pekovic second and DeMarcus Cousins third. Honestly though, this award was the a pretty hard one to vote for. There were legit cases for a lot of guys this season.