Google vs. NBA Fan Voting

Last week, the NBA All-Star voting concluded with the fans picking their favorites to start in the annual classic, which is being held on Feb. 15 in Phoenix.

As common practice by the fans, the voting is much more about a popularity contest versus which player actually deserves to start in the game. In past years, we have seen injured players, who had little time on the court, voted to start the game, and this year, Allen Iverson received the nod from the fans, even though he does not deserve to start or probably be on the team in general.

Being the web gurus (nerds) that we are, I wanted to check the true popularity of these players against the fans vote for the game. By true popularity, I am not going to be tracking who was named homecoming king at their high school, but track the truest of all-truths–Google.

Below, I have listed the top five vote-getters for the 2009 NBA All-Star game:

Player	Votes
D. Howard	3,150,181
L. James	2,940,823
K. Bryant	2,805,397
D. Wade	2,741,413
T. Duncan	2,578,16

Now, with the help of Google’s insight for search, here is a graph showing which of these top vote-getters are the top searched on the Internet within the past 90 days, or approximately, since the start of the season. Please note these numbers are all relative and not the exact number of times they are searched on Google per day.

As you can see, the Google search results and the All-Star voting does not exactly coincide. Dwight Howard did lead the All-Star voting but was fourth in the Google results. However, the other spots fit in perfectly between Google and the fans voting.

One explanation for the Howard glitch maybe that he has no real competition in the center category. The next highest vote-getter in the position for the East was Kendrick Perkins, who received a modest 621,709 votes or about 2.4M less than Howard.

I think we would all agree, quite remarkably, that Howard deserves the starting nod over Perkins, of course, unless you are a "Bahston" fan, which explains the moronic 621,709 votes (anytime I can hate on Boston fans, I will).

On the other hand, the other players had much stiffer competition in their respective positions. For example, LeBron was in the Forward category and had to compete with the likes of KG, Pierce, Bosh, Yi (huge Chinese population) and Granger, which could explain why his numbers fall behind Howard.

One striking notion that I see with this graph is that all of the players have very similar shapes to their graphs. Their peaks and their valleys all coincide with one another. To be honest, I am unsure why this may be. Anybody have an opinion?

Now, let’s revert back to my displeasure in voting Allen Iverson into the All-Star game as a starter. IMO, he does not deserve to even be in the game. Why don’t we check his Google results and compare them with other East guards who are more deserving of playing in Phoenix for the All-Star game.

The large peak at the beginning of the graph  was around the time when Iverson was traded, therefore explaining the enormous  jump in traffic on his name at that time. However, if we look at the rest of the graph, Iverson is consistently above the others in the number of times his name is searched, despite a couple of random peaks by Joe Johnson.

I do have to admit that I did think Iverson would have been a more popular search term compared to the other players listed, but his results do coincide with what the All-Star voting showed.

I could go on further, but do not want to create a novel on this blog. Check it out for yourself and play around. I understand that this is not some scientific breakthrough, but do think the results are rather  interesting and goes to show that fans, as we always assumed, vote for their favorite players and not the most deserving.