With NBA awards ballots due hours after taping, Colin Cowherd and Yahoo Sports voter Kevin O'Connor used The Herd to walk through how they planned to vote on the 2026 races. Cowherd gave Shai Gilgeous-Alexander his first-place MVP nod and was unequivocal about why, calling SGA's season one of the greatest guard campaigns in league history given that Oklahoma City finished with the best record yet again despite serious injuries to its supporting cast.
Cowherd noted that SGA had just turned in his fourth straight season averaging more than 30 points per game, finished as the league's second-leading scorer and shot 55 percent from the field while improving on virtually every advanced metric from his MVP-winning 2025 campaign. Last year Chet Holmgren was hurt for stretches, this year Jalen Williams missed time, and yet the Thunder still led the league. For Cowherd, the historical anomaly of a point guard / shooting guard hybrid being the best player on the best team — in an era dominated by big wings and centres — sealed the case.
On Defensive Player of the Year, Cowherd suggested Victor Wembanyama is so far ahead that the only suspense is whether the vote ends up unanimous, with the 65-game rule the lone variable. He framed Wembanyama's defensive impact through what he called "retreats" — players who start a drive towards the lane, see Wembanyama waiting and abort. The gap between Wembanyama and runner-up Chet Holmgren, Cowherd argued, is so wide that any non-Wemby vote would become the bigger story than the award itself.
Cowherd was even firmer on Cooper Flagg for Rookie of the Year, expressing surprise that the race is being framed as competitive at all. He pointed out that Flagg became the first rookie to lead his team in points, rebounds, assists and steals since Michael Jordan — at 19 years old, having entered the league only nine days older than LeBron James did in 2003. "It's one of the great rookie seasons of my entire lifetime," Cowherd said, conceding that Sixers guard VJ Edgecombe and UConn product Donovan Knueppel would be first-place candidates in most other years.
O'Connor, who carries an actual NBA awards ballot, agreed on Flagg but added a wrinkle on the All-NBA First Team. He and Cowherd lined up on Gilgeous-Alexander, Nikola Jokic, Wembanyama and Luka Doncic as four near-locks, with the fifth spot a coin flip between Cade Cunningham and Jaylen Brown depending on whether voters prioritise value or pure quality of play. O'Connor said Rachel Nichols' framework — using value for MVP and "best player" for All-NBA — captured why splitting the criteria can produce different outcomes despite identical inputs.
The pair also acknowledged Luka Doncic's eligibility complication, which only cleared in time for some voters but not all. Cowherd noted that any ballot submitted before the exemption ruling could distort the All-NBA First Team voting in ways that would not be retroactively fixed.
The bigger point of the segment was that the top of the 2026 awards conversation looks unusually settled. SGA, Wembanyama and Flagg are the consensus picks across most informed ballots, leaving the real debate for the second-tier categories such as Most Improved, Sixth Man and the back end of All-NBA — exactly the type of vote where margins of error tend to embarrass the voter for years afterwards. With ballots already filed, the official announcements will only confirm what Cowherd, O'Connor and most of their peers had already locked in.
