The Credits:  Variety

(with a nickname like that how could they forget TD?) because he flies under the radar and also because the Spurs for the past two years haven’t really been in contention.

The way they described basketball IQ was having a “feel for the game”:

“It’s instinctive ability that a player has, knowing when to shoot and when to make the extra pass. Knowing how to set a screen on one possession and play off it on the next. Knowing when to employ subtle defensive schemes such as ‘pulling out the chair’ in the post.”

So, I would say there are a lot of basketball-intelligent players in the NBA. Kobe, Pau, D-Fish, TD, Kidd, Nash, CP3, LBJ, Ginobli, KG, Allen, Pierce etc. The poll seems to rely just on court vision rather than any of the other criteria the Basketball IQ definition entails, so maybe that’s why TD wasn’t voted in. But yeah, TD definitely deserves a vote more than Melo does. You would think with that criteria in set, it sounds more like it’s defining a big man’s role than a guard’s but I definitely don’t disagree that Kobe probably has one of the highest b-ball IQs in today’s players for sure.

Also, it’s probably rarer nowadays to find players with that high basketball IQ saviness. To me, anyone who plays in the Triangle and suceeds in playing in it, probably understand the game of basketball much better than players just executing simple basic offensive plays. I remember there was an article talking about this somewhere on this site.