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Sports Illustrated

Sport

Michael Pina

NBA Awards: Official Picks for MVP, Rookie of the Year and More

Bam Adebayo Joel Embiid NBA Nikola Jokić Giannis Antetokounmpo Jayson Tatum Steph Curry Jackson Jr James Harden Marcus Smart

The NBA’s 2021–22 regular season is (finally) over, and with that here is my official awards ballot. It includes everything except my three All-NBA teams, which will be posted tomorrow in a separate article.

Most Valuable Player

5. Steph Curry, Warriors

Curry is still the Nos. 1, 2 and maybe 3 reason the Warriors believe they can win the championship. He’s their heart and soul, the primary driver of how they function, think and execute. All these years later, with everyone on the planet long aware of his unparalleled outside shot and the gravity it creates, there’s still no existing defense that can slow this team down. When he’s on the court, Golden State resembles a 65-win juggernaut; without him, they are a 30-win lottery-bound hopeful.

A late-season injury took the wind out of Curry’s sails, but don’t let recency bias dilute everything he did before. In October, November and December, when Golden State blew the doors off their opponents, Curry flirted with invincibility. At the time, pretty much everyone thought he was destined for a third MVP. That matters.

His individual shooting numbers are a relative disappointment but remain wild compared to the field. He’s still going to make more threes than everybody else and lead the league in free-throw percentage for the fifth time. The Warriors run at a dramatically faster pace when he’s on the floor, generating easier shots for everyone else without compromising the defense: Golden State shoots 71.3% at the rim (first place by a decent margin) and outscores opponents by 10.1 points per 100 possessions when Curry plays.

He's third in real plus-minus, behind only Nikola Jokić and Joel Embiid, and has more win shares than Devin Booker, who, along with Luka Dončić, is deserving of either this slot or the next. Curry and my actual No. 4 choice sit there by a hair, instead.

4. Jayson Tatum, Celtics

As is the case with Curry, Tatum’s irreplaceable contributions to a team that’s dominant when he’s on the court help explain why he ranks so high on a list of the league’s most valuable players. The Celtics outscore opponents by 11.7 points per 100 possessions with Tatum on the court, which is first among all players who’ve appeared in at least 50 games. When he sits, the Celtics are minus-1.8 points per 100 possessions. That net differential is second only to Jokić. (He leads all players in plus-minus at plus-638.)

As the NBA’s Player of the Week three (!) times in March, Tatum ranks second overall in real plus-minus wins, third in estimated wins and second in RAPTOR wins above replacement. In a rotation that has Rob Williams III and Marcus Smart, he’s also one of Boston’s most important defenders, a rangy, physical force who can actually guard all five positions and knows where to be off the ball.

The case against Tatum is tied to his slow start. He was inefficient early on, shooting 39.3% in November and failing to find any consistent rhythm behind the arc until sometime around the season’s halfway point. But through it all his basic numbers were impressive and his incremental improvement as a passer was spectacular. His true shooting is above league average and for the season he averaged 26.9 points, 8.0 rebounds and 4.4 assists per game. After the All-Star break, he made 40% of his threes and saw his scoring tick up to more than 30 points per game.

For several months he’s been by far the best player on the best team. Grading that entire body of work (Tatum has missed only six games this season) is how he separates himself from others. Coming into this season, there were only 49 instances in NBA history where someone tallied at least 2,000 points, 600 rebounds and 300 assists. Tatum became No. 50 last week, with Giannis Antetokounmpo and Jokić joining him a few days later.

3. Joel Embiid, 76ers

The per-game numbers are obscene: 30.6 points, 11.7 rebounds and 4.2 assists. The points warrant a scoring title and the assists are a career high. His 37.3 usage rate ranks second only behind Dončić (though only by 0.1) and his 11.2 turnover percentage has never been better. Embiid is second in estimated plus-minus, second in real plus-minus, first in free throws made and attempted and third in BPM and VORP.

There is no answer for him in the post, rumbling up the floor in transition or, jab-stepping from his sweet spot, faced up at the left wing. The degree to which he draws fouls is staggering: Embiid’s 17.4 free throws per 100 possessions are tied with 28-year-old Shaquille O’Neal for the most since at least 1974, and if Philly wins the title, there’s a virtual certainty the league office gets bombarded by official requests from opposing coaches and general managers who are desperate for some kind of rule change. Embiid has also scored at least 40 points in a dozen games, which is the most seen in an NBA season since James Harden did it during the final year of Barack Obama’s presidency. Heading into Sunday, his 158 points in the clutch led the league, with a 60.6 true shooting percentage. Not bad!

As icing on the cake, Embiid did almost all of this as Ben Simmons’s drama engulfed the organization in daily chaos that included the fact that their roster seemingly wasn’t built to sustain the loss of his DPOY-caliber versatility or top-tier playmaking. The fact that the Sixers even managed to be the Eastern Conference’s top seed for a day, on March 26, is still a bit difficult to process. Embiid carrying the Sixers through that mud can’t be overlooked.

Harden has complicated Philadelphia’s season more than he’s enhanced it, which has a slight impact on Embiid’s MVP case. Their most common five-man unit since the trade deadline (Embiid, Harden, Matisse Thybulle, Tobias Harris and Tyrese Maxey) has a better point differential than the Suns’ starting lineup. That’s absurd. The Sixers have also been atrocious when only one star is on the court; their net rating with Embiid and without Harden is minus-13.96 in 142 minutes. Not good!

Still, to Embiid’s credit, he’s missed only three games since Thanksgiving, and after digesting all the statistical achievements listed above (plus a few dozen others that read like fan fiction) it’s almost impossible to imagine not one but two superior campaigns. Alas, there have been three all-time historic seasons occurring at the same time this season.

2. Giannis Antetokounmpo, Bucks

As incredible as Embiid’s numbers are, Antetokounmpo's true shooting, PER, win shares, VORP ranking, assist rate, etc., are all better. But any argument for a 27-year-old who’s already won the award twice and is the defending Finals MVP doesn’t need to put someone else down. Antetokounmpo’s season has been outright phenomenal in more expansive ways than before.

Brook Lopez’s back surgery forced Antetokounmpo to hold the Bucks down at a different position. When he first emerged as a star, he was basically Milwaukee’s point guard. This year, a third of his minutes came at center (triple his time spent last year), and despite Milwaukee’s slide to league average in defensive rating, they were a top-five group with Antetokounmpo at the five. He helped unlock a switchier defense without abandoning Milwaukee’s base drop coverage. In the gaps and roaming along the baseline, he was still a transcendent presence on the weakside. Antetokounmpo being Antetokounmpo, he held opposing shooters to 52.8% shooting at the rim.

On offense, picking up on a trend we saw in last year’s playoffs, he was a more engaged screen setter, sucking help defenders in on hard drives to the rim, freeing up shooters without ever touching the ball. With it in his hands, there was no more terrifying player in transition or within five feet of the basket (where he made a ridiculous 74.4% of his league-high 624 shots despite being assisted on only half of his attempts at the rim).

None of that was new. But Antetokounmpo did make two startling improvements: at the free-throw line (where he shot 72.2% on a career-high 11.4 attempts per game) and from the mid-range (where he took 50 more long twos than last season and made enough for it to be considered a legitimate part of his repertoire).

Antetokounmpo continues to be unlike any player we’ve ever seen and is still learning new ways to hold the planet in his palm. Don’t be bored by his excellence, which feels normalized despite its total singularity. This season was another gem.

1. Nikola Jokić, Nuggets

As incredible as Embiid and Antetokounmpo were this season, Jokić clearly had the most positive all-around winning impact, surrounded by less talent than every other superstar. There is no Khris Middleton or Jrue Holiday in Denver. There isn’t a Harden, or even someone as good as Maxey, let alone Jaylen Brown, Draymond Green, Chris Paul or Booker. The Nuggets, of course, did not have Jamal Murray (who complements Jokić, instead of forcing him to reshape his own strengths, as was the relationship Embiid had with Simmons) for a second, while Michael Porter Jr. appeared in only nine games before a back injury sidelined him for the rest of the season.

The Nuggets still won 48 games. When Jokić was on the floor, they played like a 62-win team. When he wasn’t, they were a 17-win team (17!). That 45-game difference dwarfed everybody else. (In case you were wondering, Embiid was plus-28 and Antetokounmpo finished plus-24 in expected wins, per Cleaning the Glass.)

After playing in every game last year, Jokić didn’t miss his eighth game until the final day of the regular season. The Nuggets were 2–5 heading into it, with two wins coming against the craptastic Rockets and Pacers. That resilience helped him become the first player in NBA history to finish with 2,000 points, 1,000 rebounds and 500 assists in a season. Oscar Robertson, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, Wilt Chamberlain, LeBron James, Russell Westbrook, Kevin Garnett, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, etc., never did this.

So much of Jokić’s value came from his passing—a brilliant, unimpeachable hallmark that defies physical laws and makes everyone around him a threat. A vast majority of Jokić’s teammates posted higher effective field goal percentages and a superior shot quality when he was by their side. Alone, he was also one of the most efficient scorers the league has ever seen, a walking ultimatum from every spot on the court who forced opponents to make impossible decisions on every touch.

(In NBA history, there have been 1,013 instances where a player took over 1,300 shots in a season. Within that group, Jokić’s 66.1 true shooting percentage ranks second. Second! Only Steph Curry, during his unanimous MVP season, was better. Please stop and try to process this for a second if you clicked on this article thinking anyone else belonged here.)

He shot 71.9% in the restricted area, 60.9% in the non-restricted area of the paint (highest among all players who took at least 100 of those shots) and 53.5% from the mid-range (third-highest among all players who took at least 100 of those shots).

What about defense? Happy you asked. The Nuggets hold opponents to 109.2 points per 100 possessions when Jokić is on the court. That’s about the seventh-best defense in the league. He defends more shots than any other player and when nearby helps hold shooters to a slightly lower field goal percentage than what they’d otherwise yield. He also grabs 11 defensive rebounds per game (three higher than last year) and, in total, has collected more of them than any other player. Guarding pick-and-rolls, he can drop, hedge, blitz and recover without Denver needing to overcompensate elsewhere. Think Marc Gasol except not quite as anticipatory, with fast hands and a high steal rate.

Jokić simply hasn’t been a defensive liability all season long, and it’s helped him become the best player on the planet, performing extraordinarily well in a starting lineup that would otherwise be found on one of the league’s worst teams: Jeff Green, Monte Morris, Aaron Gordon and Will Barton. If Murray and Porter were healthy, two of those players would be coming off the bench. And for what it’s worth, that unit is plus-146 in a league-high 761 minutes. Only Boston’s (healthy) starting five has a better point differential.

To quote something Nuggets coach Michael Malone said after Jokić finished with 32 points, 15 rebounds and 13 assists on 70.6% shooting in a win over the Warriors last month: "Come on, now. What are we talking about?"

Defensive Player of the Year

3. Bam Adebayo, Heat

2. Jaren Jackson Jr., Grizzlies

1. Marcus Smart, Celtics

Apologies to Rudy Gobert, but with so many worthy candidates who assume a wider variety of responsibilities on teams that finished with a better defensive rating than the Jazz—please see my All-Defense teams below if you’re from Utah and fell into a rage reading that sentence—it felt like a good time to show three other defenders some love.

Adebayo missed nearly 30 games with a torn ligament in his thumb, but his impact in just over 1,800 minutes was more than enough to warrant recognition. Adebayo was my preseason pick to win this thing, and if there was a game, quarter or possession where I had to choose one player to get a stop, regardless of who was lined up on the other side, it’d be him.

Adebayo’s most notable work is visceral. He switches a lot of screens—on ball, off ball, before the pick is actually set, everything, always, more than any other center ever has. But watch the Heat closely and you’ll notice how even when he isn’t involved in an action, the fact that the other team has gone out of its way to avoid him has mucked up what they originally wanted to do. He’ll deny a ball reversal 25 feet from the rim and then crash the glass (Miami doesn’t allow second-chance opportunities with Adebayo on the floor) to gobble up a rebound. It’s inimitable dexterity in the shape of a wrecking ball.

There’s some three-point luck involved in Adebayo’s sterling on/off numbers (the Heat have the best defense in the league when he plays and slip to league average when he sits). They switch along the perimeter but also help off shooters, allowing a ton of threes that drop only 32.7% of the time with Adebayo around. But his presence has something to say about that dip.

Good luck beating Adebayo in isolation, too. According to Synergy, opponents who dare test him on an island have mustered only 0.735 points per possession while shooting 33.7% from the field. Those numbers are silly. But when you look at Jackson, who might be the only big as nimble along the perimeter as Adebayo is, it’s hard not to see even better isolation numbers in an extra 300 minutes of live action.

Jackson holds opponents to 28.2% shooting in these spots (third among all players who’ve finished at least 75 possessions defending an isolation), and while he doesn’t switch as much as Adebayo, there’s no reason why he couldn’t if Grizzlies coach Taylor Jenkins asked him to. If you can not only switch every Mike Conley–Gobert pick-and-roll but then also bait Conley into taking you off the bounce just to swat his floater out of bounds, you’re a walking luxury.

This leads us to another reason why Jackson holds the slightest edge over Adebayo: rim protection. Heat opponents shoot 66.7% at the rim (slightly above league average) with Adebayo on the court. Jackson, though, is a block party. His 177 blocks lead the league, as does his 7.4% block rate and 2.3 blocks per game. He does this all while spending time at two separate positions: 60% of his minutes are beside Steven Adams and 40% are at the five, next to Brandon Clarke or Kyle Anderson. Memphis’s defense with Jackson playing center allows only 55.6% shooting at the rim—translation: Their opponents are all Gabe Vincent—and when he’s nearby that figure drops to 49.3%. (Only Isaiah Hartenstein is lower among all bigs who’ve guarded at least 250 shots at the rim this season.)

That blend of power, versatility and durability makes Jackson a strong choice for Defensive Player of the Year. He might be first if not for committing the second most shooting fouls in the league—which is partially why he averages only 27.3 minutes per game—but I still pretty much flipped a coin between him and my eventual choice, a guard who has no significant weaknesses.

Smart is the best defender on the NBA’s best defense; among all players who’ve logged at least 2,000 minutes, he has the fourth-best defensive rating.

Smart’s reputation isn’t new, and he’s surrounded by elite defensive talent. But that shouldn’t take anything away from another sensational year. He can switch 1-5 pick-and-rolls, get rolled into the post and then bait offenses to test him on the block while Boston’s four other defenders stay at home.

On one play he’ll sacrifice his body drawing a charge and then on the next he’ll shadow a catch-and-shoot threat over a flare or into a dribble handoff without ever detaching himself from the inside of their jersey.

He helps conduct Boston’s switch-everything scheme and organizes the Celtics back in transition, has a sixth sense in passing lanes and always shrinks the floor when the matchup calls for it, stunting at ball-handlers who think they have daylight before executing a perfect closeout at full speed back to his own man (who, in all likelihood, is a very good player):

At 6'3", 220 pounds, he protects the rim, ambushes loose balls, ranks eighth in steals, boxes out bigs who outweigh him by 40 pounds and is a general source of havoc, grinding from play to play with a disruptive impact that ripples through opposing coaching staffs and rosters each and every game. He’s a relentless nuisance who knows what set the offense is about to run and then anticipates how to throw a wrench in its gears. There are advanced stats that appreciate all he does (he’s 14th in defensive estimated plus-minus), but so much of the evidence behind his case comes from watching him play.

It’ll be fine if Adebayo, Jackson, Gobert, Mikal Bridges or any of a few other strong candidates win. In an era increasingly defined by myriad offensive advantages, we saw several amazing (individual and team) defenders do everything they could to reverse that trend. Smart did it as much as anyone.

Sixth Man of the Year

3. Luke Kennard, Clippers

2. Bogdan Bogdanović, Hawks

1. Tyler Herro, Heat

Apologies to Cam Johnson and Kevin Love, but Kennard (who led the league in three-point percentage and saw his team perform significantly better with him on the court) and Bogdanović (who helped stabilize a shaky Hawks bench by moving there on a permanent basis in late January) get these runner-up spots by a hair.

Herro locked this award up months ago, and during a tumultuous Heat season that was full of injuries and mishmashed lineups, he provided necessary offensive firepower, averaging 20.7 points per game while making 39.9% of his threes with Miami’s highest usage rate. It’s the type of season that, for better or worse, epitomizes what Sixth Man of the Year actually is. Herro won’t be the unanimous pick, but probably should be.

Most Improved Player

3. Anfernee Simons, Trail Blazers

2. Desmond Bane, Grizzlies

1. Dejounte Murray, Spurs

The Blazers wish Simons’s breakout season came last year, when it would have supplemented Damian Lillard and CJ McCollum in unguardable three-guard lineups and an offense that could’ve been potent regardless of how that trio combined on the floor. But all things considered, as an organization that’s headed for a lengthy rebuild, Simons is a serious bright spot.

His usage rate jumped. His assist rate more than doubled. He went from averaging 7.8 to 17.3 points per game, with a three-point rate that dropped and a two-point field goal percentage that soared. This was Simons’s fourth season, but he’s somehow still only 22 years old. If he doesn’t win the award this year, don’t be surprised if he bags it sometime in the near future.

I struggled putting Bane next just because down deep in my soul I feel like Most Improved Player is not for second and third-year players. But when you go from averaging 9.2 points per game off the bench as a rookie on a team that snuck into the play-in tournament, to 18.3 points as a full-time starter and second offensive option on the second-best team in the NBA … well, exceptions exist for a reason. Bane made 43.2% of his threes last year and was somehow even better in Year 2. Remarkable stuff.

But getting back to the spirit of Most Improved Player, and how it should belong to those who make strides further along in their career, how many people thought Murray would ever have the season he just did, cracking the freaking All-Star team, averaging 21.2 points, 9.3 assists and 8.4 rebounds while making over half his two-point shots for the first time? (His field goal percentage at the rim also spiked to a career best.) It’s been a momentous season for Murray, who also leads the NBA in steals and, filling the void DeMar DeRozan left, has as many buckets in crunch time as James. His trajectory is ascending.

(Quick honorable mention to Jordan Poole. In 48 games as a starter, he averaged 20.9 points and 4.0 assists with a 59.8 true shooting percentage. He logged over 2,000 total minutes this year and with added responsibility saw his assist rate, three-point percentage rise. Even though the percentage of his baskets assisted at the rim dropped from 70% to 45%, he still maintained the same accuracy. The Warriors needed a leap from Poole, and he came through.)

Rookie of the Year

3. Evan Mobley, Cavaliers

2. Scottie Barnes, Raptors

1. Cade Cunningham, Pistons

Whatever order you want to have these three in is perfectly fine. If they stay healthy, all three should be first-ballot Hall of Famers. They impact both ends, rebound, pass, score and have skills that pretty much obliterate the need for positional designations. The rationale for having Cunningham first, by the slimmest margin, can be summed up by Pistons GM Troy Weaver (who definitely has no bias) in this piece: He’s done the most with the least.

Cunningham’s teammates do not include Darius Garland, Jarrett Allen and Love. They are not Pascal Siakam, Fred VanVleet and OG Anunoby. The Pistons are the third-youngest team in the league and their two best veterans (Kelly Olynyk and Jerami Grant) spent significant time injured this season.

So, without getting too deep over an award that’s ultimately of little consequence and involves three prodigious talents, Cunningham gets my vote. If Mobley were on the Magic and Barnes on the Rockets, how the ROY race is viewed would be a lot different than it is.

Coach of the Year

3. Erik Spoelstra, Heat

2. Monty Williams, Suns

1. Taylor Jenkins, Grizzlies

Limiting Coach of the Year to three candidates was torture. There are too many credible options! Take Minnesota’s Chris Finch. All he did was take a young, hungry roster and help turn it into a league darling (and one of the best teams in Timberwolves history). Same with J.B. Bickerstaff in Cleveland. Jason Kidd took a team that was built to score 125 points a game and made them defend. Ty Lue was a magician. Ime Udoka would win “Rookie” Coach of the Year if it was a real award. Gregg Popovich set the record for the most wins ever and the Spurs made the play-in despite trading away some of their most important players at the trade deadline. So much competence! But to me there were three jobs that have stood out from opening night until today.

It’s strange to say this, but Spoelstra has somehow become underrated. If an expansion franchise emerged tomorrow and was told it could hire any head coach in the league, there wouldn’t even need to be a meeting before Spo was selected. It’s that obvious. And when you consider how in some ways the Heat started (or at least rapidly accelerated) the player empowerment era, there’s an irony to them also, one decade later, having a head coach prosper as the face of their franchise. It’s something that can only be said about one other organization (the Spurs). Spoelstra’s a bold, ingenious motivator whose job security is fortified like a Supreme Court justice. But that doesn’t mean every season is a smooth ride.

Coaching Jimmy Butler is not easy. Convincing a 22-year-old who thinks he’s as good as Dončić, Trae Young and Ja Morant to come off the bench is not easy. Exploiting a hyper aggressive defense that didn’t have Adebayo for over a month and not ever letting them slip below league average is not easy. Integrating no-nonsense veterans like Kyle Lowry and PJ Tucker is not easy. Somehow finishing with the best record in the Eastern Conference despite Lowry, Adebayo, Butler and Herro only sharing the floor for 119 minutes is not easy.

Monty’s case is just as powerful but also much easier to explain. The Suns are the best team in the league and he is their coach. The Suns also lost in last year’s Finals and did not experience any hangover. That’s leadership.

And, following in step with what this award traditionally honors, no head coach’s team exceeded expectations more than Jenkins’s Grizzlies. In addition to implementing a system that accentuates his players’ strengths, Jenkins’s communication style fit them like a glove. He’s open and willing to implement a suggestion, and they appreciate it.

“[Taylor] is one of the best coaches in the league, and probably the only coach that actually listens to their players and lets them actually run the play that they want to run,” Dillon Brooks told Sports Illustrated. Those who speak feel heard and it’s a critical reason why the culture brewing down in Memphis is so special.