With roughly 450 players to parse through, it can be tough to narrow down a list of candidates for some of the NBA's more obscure, superstar-free awards.
With no clear-cut candidate leading the pack this season, that was particularly true for the league's Sixth Man of the Year award, so it should come as no surprise that there were a variety of names and opinions spread out among the 130 media members who voted.
Yet even in such a year of contention, there's be no doubt about one thing - Jamal Crawford was the wrong choice.
Crawford became the first three-time winner of the award when he was announced as the recipient on Tuesday, but the fact of the matter is that he shouldn't even have received a top-three vote.
The 16-year veteran has carved out a successful career as an off-the-bench gunner who uses a devastating dribble and quick release to often create something out of nothing, and that will always remain a valuable skill in the Association. Even as reputed chuckers dwindle in the age of analytics, the need for shooters who can create for themselves will never completely cease.
But at 36, Crawford's best days are behind him. He was a below-average player by virtually every metric this season. For that, he was rewarded with one of the basketball world's biggest awards.
If you're going to shoot as often as Crawford did - 22.1 attempts per 100 possessions - it would be beneficial to do so efficiently. Crawford shot 40.4 percent from the field and 34 percent from 3-point range, heavily negating the offensive value of his ability to get to the free throw line. He finished with a sub-par Player Efficiency Rating of 14.04 and a 364th-ranked Real Plus-Minus of -2.44, coming in just behind household names Axel Toupane and Devyn Marble.
Even worse, Crawford's Clippers performed 6.9 points worse per 100 possessions when their supposedly invaluable reserve was on the court. That's partly an indication of how bad Los Angeles' bench was as a whole, but it's damning for Crawford nonetheless.
Andre Iguodala, by contrast, the reigning Finals MVP and the man who should have walked away with the Sixth Man award, saw the Warriors improve when he took the court, despite coming in behind an already-outstanding starting unit.
Iguodala's defensive brilliance and two-way contributions weren't gaudy enough for an award reserved for empty calories, it turns out.
Heck, if voters wanted to reward a defensively inept reserve who put up traditional numbers off the bench, even Thunder big Enes Kanter would have been a better option than Crawford, as Kanter averaged 12.7 points and 8.1 rebounds on 57.6 percent shooting in only 21 minutes per game.
Will Barton, Jeremy Lin, Dennis Schroder, Ed Davis, and the Raptors' combination of Patrick Patterson and Cory Joseph - who propped up one of the game's best bench units - are just some of the additional names that should have received consideration before Crawford.
A contentious award decision isn't worth losing sleep over, but when voters get it as wrong as they did with the 2015-16 Sixth Man of the Year, it's also tough to ignore.
