How Do Pre-Season Expectations Influence Voting?

Expectations your expectations coming into a season have a huge huge factor on how voters vote whether that's subconscious or not some deep psychoanalysis required I don't know. Historically when you go back and you look at like the pre-season expectations of a team teams that blow those expectations out of the water they get a huge boost for someone like Steve Nash in 2005 Kobe Bryant in 2008 where he had come off a summer requesting a trade three straight struggling seasons. Those kinds of expectations really really influence voting whereas when you have the Warriors in 2017 you have the extreme opposite where you have basically peak Kevin Durant and peak Steph Curry. Even though the Warriors actually didn't look very good without Steph Curry and