NLL End of Season Awards Voting is Broken
The Next Major League continues to show disrespect to its players and personnel with a process that needed an overhaul before the pandemic started.
This was originally supposed to be a longer article on who I think deserves to win the End of Season awards for the 2024-25 NLL season, but the NLL nominations for those awards were leaked Monday afternoon. Adam Levi posted the finalists on his Twitter account, short lists that were incomplete and frankly giant middle fingers to the league’s players and media. It’s a broken voting process, a lazy ass buddy system that should have been fixed pre-pandemic and continues to trudge along anyways. I hated it years ago; I hate it now.
The league end of season voting system needs to change, and the NLL needs to take a hard look in the mirror at how they continue to operate in ways that are inconsiderate of the players that are their selling feature and media that are the league’s greatest megaphones. Small and consistent slights add up.
Three years ago, I received an email from the NLL stating I, as a member of media covering the NLL, was allowed to vote for End of Season awards for the 2022-23 NLL regular season. I recall being excited for this honor and quickly opening up the link I received that took me to the ballot. That excitement morphed into disappointment. The process was the same as it had been when I worked for the Swarm and input John and Andy Arlotta’s EoS picks at their direction.
Teams submit one or two finalists for each category — MVP, DPotY, Goalie, Borrelli, etc. — and the league puts those nominations in a list, distributes the ballot, and Board of Governors (BoG), front office, and media members select from those culled lists. It’s intended to keep the process simple and quick, getting the votes tallied up immediately before the postseason starts and voters start inherently factoring in postseason play. The consequences of being quick and easy have made it a best buddies club, with teams submitting individuals for categories they most certainly did not belong to or outright leaving certain individuals who deserved consideration from the process altogether.
It’s a stupid system that delegitimizes the awards given some of the names submitted and omitted, particularly the Tom Borrelli Award (Media Person).
I told the Marketing & Communications Manager back in May 2023 I was honored for the opportunity, but the league’s process was disrespectful to players given the names missing from the lists, and until the league changed their process, it wasn’t something I could participate in in good conscience. I never received a response; I did receive a ballot for last season and ignored it; I have not received one this year (despite being a finalist for the media award), and having seen the list of individuals up for each category, I wouldn’t participate even if I had.
Again, this system is intended to be quick and easy; having voting individuals manually submit names for certain categories is going to create its own issues, as individuals will be completely stupid with their selections (which is currently the case to a degree). I’m not advocating for that system, as it would be more of a headache than the current one. What I’m advocating for is removing personnel who don’t pay attention to the league from the voting process altogether.
That misinformed opinion aspect is unfortunately an inherent failing of voting that’s the crux of the issue today. There are front office personnel, BoG members, and media that don’t watch anything other than their team/team they cover, and giving ill-informed individuals that much responsibility results in an unsteady and gap-riddled foundation being laid. Bias will always play a role in voting, but people with subjective intentions will pick “their guy” over players/personnel that actually deserve to win awards. If there’s one thing that I’ve learned over my years covering the NLL, it’s that people in positions of authority in the NLL likely aren’t paying enough attention or are focused on the wrong thing, like wanting to focus on a championship rematch between the Bandits and FireWolves instead of the much more impactful and better storylines of Tucker Out Lymphoma Night or telling me to submit the same picks for his EoS ballot as his father.
This year, there are notable exclusions from the lists voting members have to pick from, and it’s unconscionable, disrespectful as hell, a complete farce from a league that demonstrates time and time again that it wants to be The Next Major League but can’t be bothered to do the little things correctly. No Zach Currier for MVP, but Danny Logan’s up for that award instead? No Ryan Lanchbury for OPotY? Ian MacKay had a phenomenal season as a forward but is up for TPotY. It’s easy for the league to deflect the blame to teams — hell, it’s designed to, “They picked these people, not us!” — but that excuse is as flimsy as a soaking wet piece of 80 gsm paper trying to stop a cannonball discharged from its namesake. The NLL created a broken system, relies on people that don’t pay nearly enough attention, and the league can’t be bothered to spend time and energy during the offseason — or maybe a pandemic — to come up with something better.
And because I take media stuff personally, how in the world are Brad Challoner, Steve Bermel, Ashley Docking, Adam Levi, Graeme Perrow, Paul Tutka, Stephen Stamp, and Tino Fera (I’m forgetting names, I know, I apologize, I’m in a bitchy huff) not up for the Tom Borrelli Award but miserable mooks that can’t be bothered to put effort into their game prep and ruin team broadcasts with their laziness and intentional lack of knowledge are up for the award?! There are members on this list that covered less than a handful of games or made the NLL’s most forward-facing product objectively worse for fans. I haven’t worked with IL Indoor for over a year and you dumb asses listed me as still contributing to them in my nomination.
Indolent, petulant, ten-ply members of a circle-jerk club doing everything they can to inhibit the growth of their league than pay an atom’s amount of respect for the players and independent media that sacrifice so much for the love of this game.
The current system is poisoned and warped by politics, pettiness, and ineptitude, serving only as another black eye from the league continuing to punch itself in the face with easily avoidable missteps. It should’ve been rectified during the downtime of the pandemic, but we were too busy not playing games for two years to do anything.
Create a separate committee to oversee this matter, comprised of members that are independent, as objective as possible, and actually pay attention to the goings ons in the NLL. Throw the responsibilities of the Hall of Fame at them, too, since that’s something that’s fallen by the wayside again.
I hope this article tanks my candidacy. The flippancy demonstrated by not even considering some of my colleagues for our most prestigious award because of stupid personal vendettas or not giving an actual shit and watching your product or not engaging with anything that isn’t blowing smoke up your ass is as staggering as realizing how Abbie is going to use golf to get revenge on Joel in The Last of Us 2.
How you treat people matters, through large actions and through small actions. I know I’m too tuned into what goes on in the NLL and see shit most fans wouldn’t notice or be bothered by; these nominations will be reduced down to just the top three the NLL reveals to the public, so I’m getting angry about something that frankly won’t have any public consequences. But the NLL consistently screws up how it treats players and media, and it’s noticed by and wears on folks that give their health, passion, and personal resources to this league for little benefit, if any at all. The NLL will chase away the best and brightest that are nothing but a boon to this sport as they finally hit their capacity for handling the NLL’s bullshit and abscond to greener pastures, unfettered with having to deal with the never-ending frustrations of the Next Major League.