My officially unofficial NBA awards ballot: Individual Awards

Who I would have voted for, if the league had afforded me a vote

Photo by Ron Jenkins/Getty Images

No need for a long preamble here. The season is finally over, so it’s awards time. I do not have an official ballot, but given the degree to which I follow the league and the fact that you have been following along with me throughout the season, I’m going to lay out how I would have voted, if I’d been afforded a vote.

We’re breaking each of the awards down by category, starting today with the individual awards and finishing tomorrow with the All-NBA, All-Defense, and All-Rookie teams.

As always, it is important to remember that if I didn’t vote for your favorite player or elected to place him lower on the ballot than you would have; it’s not because I hate and/or didn’t watch your favorite team — it’s obviously because I hate you, personally.

Without further ado, here we go…

Preseason Predictions: Jokic (MVP), Evan Mobley (DPOY), Monk (6MOY), Wembanyama (ROY), Tyrese Maxey (MIP)

The MVP criteria I like to use is admittedly somewhat amorphous. I try to identify “the player who made the greatest individual contribution to his team’s ability to win basketball games during the regular season.”

I specifically say “greatest” rather than merely “best” or “most important” because I think it allows for the combination of those things, while also affording you the opportunity to consider differences in playing time, which I do think should matter. If two players played at roughly the same level but one played 500 more minutes, the one with the larger minute load almost certainly made a greater contribution.

I also try not to reward or penalize players for the relative quality of their teammates, and I try not to live in alternate realities where the reasoning depends on counterfactuals that are both unprovable and unfalsifiable. I take the season as it actually happened and base my conclusions on the actual facts.

Given those parameters, I find it difficult to land on anyone other than Jokic as this year’s MVP. He is the world’s best player, and he controls every inch of the floor, every single night. There is not only no good answer for him offensively; there is no answer at all. Whatever the defense does, he can either use it against them or, failing that, beat the coverage anyway. No matter what. He consistently elevates every player with whom he shares the floor, and his team is greater than the sum of its parts largely due to his ability to make it so. The Nuggets once again thoroughly demolished all comers when he was in the game, and completely collapsed without him. If there had been a significant difference in minutes played between the other top candidates (SGA and Doncic) and Jokic, perhaps you could have talked me into one of them. But he played the most minutes of the three, finishing ninth in the NBA in total minutes played. This may not have been Jokic’s best individual season, but it was the NBA’s best individual season this year.

I must have flip-flopped between SGA and Luka about 500 times over the final week of the season. I think it’s worth noting that having one guy at 2 and one at 3 doesn’t mean the difference is huge. In this case I feel like it’s maybe something along the lines of 52-48 or maybe 53-47; but you don’t get to put that on the ballot, so here we are. In the end, the start-to-finish consistency of Gilgeous-Alexander’s performance, his contributions to top-four units on both ends of the floor, and specifically his much greater contribution to his team’s defense won out. But if anyone wanted to have Doncic ahead, I honestly wouldn’t put up much of an argument. I think they are in the same tier, and I typically don’t mind movement within tiers as much as from one tier to the next.

Giannis had a spectacular season. I don’t think you can blame him for Damian Lillard taking a step backward or Khris Middleton not being healthy for much of the year. I don’t think you can blame him for Adrian Griffin mis-using Brook Lopez nor Doc Rivers under-using him. I do think you can lay some blame at his feet for the coaching mess overall, though, considering he apparently advocated for Griffin to get the job over Nick Nurse and then was one of many players who had a hand in publicly and privately undermining Griffin and contributing to his ouster. Due to those factors, I think he needed to have a significantly better season than the other candidates to finish any higher on the list. But among the top four guys, he finished third in Neil Paine’s Estimated RAPTOR and BBall-Index’s LEBRON, tied for third in BPM and VORP at Basketball-Reference, and fourth in DunksAndThrees’ EPM. That doesn’t clear the bar, so he ends up in fourth. (Which, by the way, is no great insult. Fourth on the ballot still falls easily inside the top 1% of all 600-plus players who stepped on the floor this season. Being considered the fourth-most valuable player in the league this year is an incredible accomplishment for anyone, considering the quality of play leaguewide — and that’s true even if they have multiple previous MVPs and a Finals MVP like Giannis.)

The fifth spot came down to Brunson, Jayson Tatum, and (to a lesser extent) Anthony Edwards. Brunson’s centrality to his team’s success, as well as his ridiculous stretch run during which (as noted by

Jonathan Macri

at

Knicks Film School

) he led the NBA in total points by the same margin as the one between second and 42nd on that list over the final month of the season, while also finishing second in total assists and leading the Knicks to the No. 2 seed in the East, tipped the scales in his direction. Tatum, to me, proactively scaled back his individual contributions this year relative to the last two in order to achieve greater team success. It worked, and the Celtics are better for it. That shouldn’t necessarily bring with it a lower finish in MVP voting, but this season didn’t go exactly the same way as did the previous two. There were some even greater individual performances this year than in some past years, and Brunson’s stands out among them. He carried the highest usage and assist rates among this trio, finished neck and neck with Tatum in true shooting (and ahead of Edwards), led the trio in Win Shares and Win Shares per 48 minutes, as well as BPM, VORP, and EPM. He became essentially unstoppable as a scorer, doing the thing the three players all do best, at the highest level of the three. Tatum and Edwards are each better defenders, but not by such a margin that it tipped the scales away from what Brunson did offensively — even if only because they both seemed to be, at best, the third-best defender in their own starting lineup. (Which is also no slight to either player. They were behind All-Defense guys.)

Honorable Mentions (alphabetical): Anthony Edwards, Jayson Tatum

Gobert re-asserted himself for most of this season as the top defender in the NBA. He reclaimed the rim-protection crown in the player-tracking numbers, finished the season as the NBA’s best pick-and-roll defender (per Second Spectrum) as well as the NBA’s best at executing the league’s most common defensive coverage, and a top-20 help defender against drives (on par with Adebayo). He anchored the league’s best defense with a bullet, and he was the most important contributor to that defense by significant margin.

Wembanyama was the most terrifying and possibly even best defender in the league by the end of the year, and his work as a rim-protector and help-defender helps distinguish him from Adebayo here. As much as I both admire and value Bam’s versatility and the role it plays in Miami’s defense, I’m typically going to defer to players who have outsized impacts near the rim, because that tends to more strongly correlate with defensive efficiency. If Bam were on, say, peak Draymond Green’s level as a space defender, I might feel differently. As it is, if we have to split hairs, I am going to lean ever so slightly toward paint defense.

Honorable Mentions (alphabetical): Alex Caruso, Anthony Davis, Herb Jones, Jalen Suggs

Monk finishes ahead of the pack in Sixth Man voting for me, for essentially the same reason that Brunson claimed the final spot on my MVP ballot: he was far more central to his team’s success. Monk operated as the Kings’ de facto backup point guard and their closing-unit off guard, and his two-man game with Domantas Sabonis anchored almost all of the non-De’Aaron Fox action for Sacramento’s offense. His growth as a playmaker this season was remarkable, and enough to overcome a somewhat down year in the three-point shooting department.

Reid ultimately emerged as likely the best backup big man in the NBA this season, but he also played most of his minutes alongside either Gobert or Karl-Anthony Towns until the stretch run of the season when Towns was out; and his offense (his best skill) was more often a secondary or tertiary threat than Monk’s, who operated as a No. 1 scoring option for a lot of his time on the floor. Reid’s improvement as a defender and rim protector this season made this close, but again, Monk felt far more central to his team’s success.

Powell fits the mold of the classic Sixth Man, but I viewed him as a distant third to the top two contenders.

Honorable Mentions (alphabetical): Bogdan Bogdanovic, Al Horford, Isaiah Joe, T.J. McConnell, Bobby Portis; and Josh Hart (ineligible due to starting 42 games)

I honestly don’t feel like an explanation needs to be provided for Rookie of the Year. I would be shocked if all 100 voters didn’t fill out the exact same ballot in the exact same order, give or take a homer vote or two.

Honorable Mentions (alphabetical): None

I almost went with Brunson for Most Improved. But then I remembered that I’m deciding on the player who improved the most — not the player whose improvement was most important. And I think Suggs improved to a slightly greater degree than did Brunson. Elevating from borderline All-Star and All-NBA to MVP candidate is a much more impactful jump than the one from “sort of a rotation player if you squint” to All-Defense lock and knockdown shooter. But the latter jump is a larger one, I think, and that’s why I went with Suggs. And that’s the same reason White ended up on the list rather than some of the other candidates I considered.

Honorable Mentions (alphabetical): Nickeil Alexander-Walker, Donte DiVincenzo, Dante Exum, Jalen Johnson, Herb Jones, Jonathan Kuminga, Tyrese Maxey, Aaron Nesmith, Collin Sexton, Jalen Williams

Preseason Predictions: Daigneault (COY), No Prediction (EOY)

I felt there was a clear top two in the Coach of the Year race with Mosley and Daigneault battling it out at the top.

They took two of the four youngest teams in the NBA and led them to the second (Magic, fourth-youngest) and fourth (Thunder, second-youngest) best defenses in the league. They each finished far ahead of where they were expected to check in, record-wise and in the standings. OKC had greater success and I have no doubt that Daigneault is a fantastic coach, but the turmoil Orlando dealt with throughout the season due to injuries and a lack of quality guard play beyond Jalen Suggs ultimately tipped me in Mosley’s direction. I wouldn’t argue too strongly with someone who felt differently, though. Finch came in third on the strength of his team’s defense and ability to weather the absence of Karl-Anthony Towns.

Honorable Mentions (alphabetical order): Willie Green, Michael Malone, Joe Mazzulla, Nick Nurse, Tom Thibodeau, Ime Udoka

Deciding between Rose and Stevens for Executive of the Year (which, to be clear, the media does not vote for; but given that it is a postseason award, I felt it merited inclusion here) was tougher than I thought it’d be. Rose made the best value signing of the offseason by landing Donte DiVincenzo for the mid-level exception. He made the best in-season trade by acquiring OG Anunoby. And the Miles McBride extension, signed immediately after trading away Immanuel Quickley, looks like a heist. Stevens probably made the two best individual moves of the offseason, though, in trading for both Kristaps Porzingis and Jrue Holiday.

I went with Rose because I felt like were it not for the DiVincenzo and Anunoby moves, in particular, the Knicks would not have been anywhere close to as good as they were, while the Celtics could (and likely would) still have been the East’s No. 1 seed even if they had changed nothing this offseason. That may seem like an odd tiebreaker given how much freaking better the Celtics were than everyone else this season, but that was my thought process.

As for Stone, between hiring Ime Udoka, signing Fred VanVleet and Dillon Brooks, and drafting Amen Thompson and Cam Whitmore, it feels like he had an extraordinarily high hit rate with his moves this year, and they each helped propel the Rockets much higher in the standings than anyone reasonably could gave expected this season. That’s especially true given how much of an outright disaster this team looked like over the past couple of seasons.

Honorable Mentions (alphabetical order): Nico Harrison, Daryl Morey, Kevin Pritchard