The NBA has started the process of lining up voters for postseason awards, and if form holds from recent years the ballots will be due shortly after the end of the regular season.
Some categories will be easier for those on the voting panel to fill out than others. Defensive Player of the Year might not take voters very long (spoiler alert, it’ll be San Antonio's Victor Wembanyama) and Rookie of the Year is basically going to be a two-contender race
(a Duke guy will win; it’s TBD if it’ll be Charlotte's Kon Knueppel or Dallas' Cooper Flagg).
Other races will be tougher. When talking MVP, for example, logical arguments can be made for Oklahoma City's Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Denver's Nikola Jokic, the Los Angeles Lakers' Luka Doncic, Wembanyama, Boston's Jaylen Brown and probably a few others as well.
Another of those wide-open races? Coach of the Year.
There is no shortage of candidates. J.B. Bickerstaff is likely going to guide Detroit — a team that made headlines for losing streaks just two years ago — to the No. 1 seed in the Eastern Conference. Mitch Johnson, in his first full season at the helm in San Antonio (he did coach 77 of the Spurs' 82 games last season, but technically, this is full season No. 1), will have the Spurs in the No. 1 or No. 2 spot on the Western Conference bracket. Quin Snyder in Atlanta, Charles Lee in Charlotte, Jordan Ott in Phoenix and Darko Rajakovic should, at minimum, get some consideration as well.
And then there's Boston's Joe Mazzulla. The Celtics played most of this season without Jayson Tatum and were expected by some to be a fall-back-to-the-pack team this season because of Tatum's injury and the departures of players like Al Horford, Kristaps Porzingis and Jrue Holiday. Oops. The Celtics are at 50 wins, again, and Mazzulla has done an admirable job.
He was asked before Boston's game on Monday about Coach of the Year, and specifically his place in that race. What happened next was ... well, probably not unexpected.
“I don't need it," Mazzulla said. “I think it’s a stupid award.”
It's probably now reasonable to think the Celtics won't be sending out any Coach of the Year pitches to voters on Mazzulla's behalf. Some teams do that; among the more memorable ones in recent years was Utah mailing out an actual album cover depicting then-Jazz center Rudy Gobert as a jazz artist (get it?) when hyping his Defensive Player of the Year chances.
There will be some lobbying for awards. It has already started. Wembanyama stated his MVP case after a game in Miami last week, and Keldon Johnson is also being promoted by fellow Spurs players as a Sixth Man of the Year frontrunner. (His main competition there figures to be Miami's Jaime Jaquez Jr.)
And last week, the National Basketball Players Association was among those weighing in on the 65-game rule for award eligibility in most cases — noting the collapsed lung Detroit's Cade Cunningham suffered earlier this month could keep him from reaching the minimum number of games needed to be on the ballot for the All-NBA teams.
“We always knew when there’s a line you draw that somebody’s going to fall on the other side of that line,” NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said last week. “It may feel unfair in that particular instance. Let’s see what happens at the end of this year.”
There's nothing wrong with teams lobbying for their guy, or guys, to win awards. There's also nothing wrong with Mazzulla making very clear that he's focused on far bigger things than individual honors.
“You shouldn’t have it,” Mazzulla said of the award. "And it’s more about the players and it’s more about the work that the staff puts in. It’s just that simple. I really don’t ever want to be asked or talked about it again. It’s just that dumb. So, the players play, it’s about them. Staff works their (butt) off. I'm grateful to have ’em.”
The team awards are all that seem to really matter to Mazzulla. It won't stop people from voting for him, but it's a stance that should be respected.
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