Rational Voter Theory in the NBA

ESPN recently released their annual list of the NBA's top 100 players of 2026, decided on by 7 panelists. These professionals have dedicated their lives to watching basketball feeding their analysis to fans who, however dedicated to their teams, cannot hope to watch every game every night. In this, we arrive at the theory of a rational voter. There are many opportunity costs to watching basketball, such as working, studying, or doing Public Choice homework. This means that the MC curve of the casual fan must slope up with increasing opportunity cost for each additional unit of basketball consumed. Additionally, without being paid for watching the game nonstop, there are obviously decreasing marginal benefits of another unit of basketball (watch a Kings versus Nets game to find out). At some point, where MB=MC of basketball knowledge, there is an optimal point. Can we show this empirically?

It's complicated. The NBA All-Star game participants are selected by a combination of media member, player, and fan voting, the results of which are published. One would probably expect when comparing player and fan differentials to media rankings that the players would be closer to the "truth", i.e. maximum knowledge, as their MB of knowledge is higher and their MC is lower, on account of their salaries and scouting reports, and thus higher equilibrium point. However, players only averaged .3 points closer to the media than fans on average.

Perhaps this means that players are actually under-consuming knowledge, as they consistently rank close to the fans who aren't paid millions to study film. This could be explained by the now-famous NBA player Twitter habit. The rational voter consumes the knowledge that is easiest to find first, meaning social media in this case. Take a twitter-controversial player like Lika Doncic as an example: players rank him around 10, yet the media has him at 4. As another example, a rookie player like Cooper Flagg is placed by players at 34, yet rises to 23 in the eyes of professionals. This is an interesting example of it being rational to consume more - one would expect better game-planning for players who are more accurate about the skill level of their opponents.