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FIBA Europe announced the winner of their 2014 Men's Player of the year voting today. For the second year in a row Tony Parker won the award behind 382 expert votes and a devil's number over ten thousand fan votes. I love Tony and after everything he has done for the French national team over the years combined with the Spurs magical play in the 2013/14 NBA Finals he is definitely deserving of the award, but I though his absence from the last World Cup would open up the competition a bit more. Oh well.
After combining fan and expert voting the accumulated ranking placed Serbia's Miloš Teodosić in 2nd and Parker's Spurs teammate Boris Diaw in 3rd spot.
Goran Dragic ranked 4th with 185 expert votes and to me a bit disappointing 9678 fan votes. It's half less of the love he got from fans last year. But he did get 22 more nods of approval in the other column and placed a spot higher this year, so we can take it as an expert win.
Just behind Goran in 5th place, is the Suns 27th pick of the 2014 draft Bogdan Bogdanovic. No love was spared here; Bogdan's 29.094 fan votes were second only to his teammate from the Serbian national team, Miloš Teodosić (29.191). Serbia is really happy about that silver medal! Parker was third in fan voting with his 10.666.
Kudos to the proud fans! Those votes helped the Serbs skip a few places in the final accumulated ranking. Bogdan "only" had the 7th most expert votes (116), placing him behind both Pau Gasol (144) and Dirk Nowitzki (131). At 22 those seem like ok names to be trailing when listening to experts. Looking up to be a brilliant pick by Ryan McDonough!
Here is the full rank:
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Congrats to Goran and Bogdan!
My logical conclusion: So from the Top5 players on FIBA Europe's POY Rank; one plays for a club in Russia, two play for the current NBA Champ San Antonio Spurs and the other two are Phoenix Suns. Essentially this means that when Bogdan finally gets here we're winning a Championship!