Orlando Magic’s Most Popular Player: Breaking down the fan vote

The Nominations

The first thing I wanted to do in engaging the fans was simply to create a list of nominees to put together players for the Twitter poll. Without any thought of ranking or ordering players, I wanted to ask the simple question: Who are the most popular players in Magic history. I put out a call for nominations to see what came in.

This was an important part of the process. Moreso just to get a sense of who fans were thinking about when posed this question and what they valued in this popularity question.

To use this information, I just tabulated all the votes players got to add more to my full list of nominees — especially in setting up the Twitter poll.

As expected, the big names got plenty of votes. Nick Anderson received the most nominations in this process, followed by Shaquille O’Neal, Tracy McGrady, Hedo Turkoglu and Darrell Armstrong.

Those are all the names you expected and they all finished easily within the top 10 of our final list.

It seemed the fan nominations were, as I hoped and expected, skewed toward local fan favorites. Players like Darrell Armstrong and Bo Outlaw — two players only longtime Magic fans would truly appreciate — received more nominations than Anfernee Hardaway. Penny ended up finishing third in the overall poll.

So the nominations list was more about finding the players who may have slipped through the cracks. It was more interesting to see were the players fans nominated who did not get votes anywhere else in the poll.

Orlando Magic

Rafer Alston, who ended up finishing 19th in the list, entered the poll from fan nominations. His play during the 2009 Playoffs is certainly something fans remember and remember well. He endeared himself to the team in the span of four months, to the point that fans were disappointed when he ultimately moved on. Rafer Alston is still a player Magic fans discuss passionately.

Steve Francis entered here with a single nomination. He played two seasons in Orlando but had a stellar first season that often gets forgotten during the beginning of Dwight Howard‘s career. He was one of my snubs from the top-30 list.

That is where players like Carlos Arroyo entered too. He was also a snub because of his impact with the Puerto Rican community in Central Florida from the moment he arrived. He is the exact kind of player this list was supposed to capture. But interestingly enough, he was absent from a lot of our lists and probably would not have gotten mentioned if not for the fan nomination.

Other one-off players that got fan nominations were guys like Corey Maggette (who had a stellar rookie year in Orlando), Glen Davis, Pat Garrity and even a grinder like Joe Wolf.

Not all of them could make the top-30 list. But it was great to see so many remember these great players.