Editor's Note: Back on March 31, our Kyle Ratke wrote about the Rookie of the Year race. With Thursday's announcement, we thought it would be fitting to re-purpose it. Enjoy.
Sometimes when I play basketball with my buddies and a game starts out 7-1 or 8-0, we start over.
(I am normally on the losing team. So yeah, you probably guessed right.)
My team normally doesn’t have a chance to come back and we want to make it a closer game. Things are fun when things are competitive. That’s why we love sports so much.
It seems like this is the exact strategy that some pundits are using in the Rookie of the Year race.
Yes, my business card does have the Minnesota Timberwolves logo on it. You can take from that what you will.
This argument probably seems a little biased, but it shouldn’t matter.
Andrew Wiggins should win Rookie of the Year, and it’s not really close.
We should try to form a debate, of course. There are other rookies and that’s the responsible thing to do. We can look at stats, advanced metrics and everything else that we’d find on Basketball-Reference.com.
One thing that we can’t do, though, is judge Wiggins on expectations.
Wiggins was the No. 1 pick in the draft. He had the highest expectations going into the season among rookies. So, should he be punished? Of course not.
I was talking to another writer a few weeks ago and I made the comparison of Karl Malone’s 1996-97 MVP season to what was happening to Wiggins in this year’s ROY race.
I get that MVP and ROY are two very different awards and the winners are in two very different talent brackets.
Don’t get me wrong. Malone was great that year. He averaged 27.4 points and 9.9 rebounds per game at age 33, leading the Jazz to 64 wins.
But there was another player that year named Michael Jordan who was pretty darn good. Jordan led the NBA with a 29.6 scoring averaging to go with 5.9 rebounds and 4.5 assists per game. He was remarkable, leading the Bulls to 69 wins. The odds were against Jordan before the season even started, though. He had already won five MVP awards, including the 1995-96 award. Malone hadn’t won one yet.
In a vacuum, Jordan would have won this award. His numbers were more impressive and he played on the better team (something that is extremely important in NBA MVP voting). But he was Michael Jordan and voters were bored. They voted for something new, even if it might not have been the correct choice. Jordan was a constant. Thirty points, six boards and five assists was the regular for Jordan. It was the standard that he had created. A 25-point game for Jordan wasn’t very impressive to the NBA audience anymore, unfortunately.
(Jordan won the next year’s MVP, so the voters did make up for it. Kind of.)
That might be something LeBron James is going through this season going up against James Harden and Steph Curry. I don’t think James should win it, but while averaging 25.7 points, 7.3 assists, 5.9 rebounds and 1.6 steals per game, we should be talking about him more than we are.
Wiggins isn’t anywhere near where Jordan and James are, obviously. It feels dirty to compare him to the two even a little bit. What I will say is that Wiggins has been so consistently good all season long that there’s a good chance that people have just gotten used to it. While players like Elfrid Payton, Nerlens Noel and Nikola Mirotic have played well as of late, they are simply the new fad. This is something Wiggins has been doing since December.
Due to injuries, the Wolves have had to rely on Wiggins so much this season. He’s 10th in the league with 35.7 minutes per game. Minutes don’t mean anything, though, unless you do something with them. And he has. He’s averaging 16.2 points per game and has improved his aggressiveness throughout the season. He’s hauling in four rebounds per game and he’s an above-average three-point (32.5 percent) and free-throw (74.9 percent) shooter for a rookie.
One thing that doesn’t end up in the box score is Wiggins’ ability on the defensive side of the ball. Wiggins has constantly matched up against the opposing team’s best perimeter player. LeBron James? Check. Russell Westbrook? Check. Rudy Gay? Check. Chris Paul? Check.
His ability to play both sides of the ball is often overlooked, but despite what AAU teams might teach players these days, a player must play defense for roughly half the game.
Wiggins has already won four Rookie of the Month Awards and after averaging 17.9 points and 4.8 rebounds per game in the month of March, he’ll likely win his fifth.
Payton, Mirotic and Noel have combined for two awards.
(In fairness, they are competing with each other in the East for the award. Nobody in the West has threatened Wiggins.)
I’m not saying these three aren’t good players. In fact, I think Mirotic and Noel have the chance to be very special and if Payton can figure out how to shoot free throws, he could be as well.
It’s just too little too late at this point in the season for them to overtake Wiggins as the Rookie of the Year.
Mirotic is averaging 10 points and five boards per game, but before the All-Star break that number was 7.1 points per game while he was shooting just 39.5 percent from the field. Yes, he’s on a contender, but I’m not sure how that equates to a Rookie of the Year trophy.
Noel has been great defensively, averaging 1.9 blocks and 1.8 steals per game. He’s been fantastic after the All-Star break, averaging 13.9 points and 10.5 rebounds per game. But before that, he was averaging just 8.2 points and 7.2 rebounds while shooting 56.1 percent from the free-throw line.
Payton has been a fine rookie point guard. This was a nice article, but if we polled every GM in the league, would any (besides Rob Hennigan) choose the season Payton has had over Wiggins’ season? Probably not. He’s averaging 8.9 points, 6.3 assists and 4.2 rebounds per game, but he can’t shoot free throws (54.3 percent) and he’s made just eight threes all season long.
Warriors head coach Steve Kerr made his Rookie of the Year favorite known after his team’s shootaround at the Target Center on Feb. 11.
“I don’t even know who else (besides Wiggins) would be in the conversation.”
In 21 games since Kerr made that comment, Wiggins has finished with 20 or more points in nine games, 15 or more points in 18 games, five or more rebounds in 15 games and has played at least 31 minutes in all of them.
If nobody else was in the conversation 21 games ago, I’m not quite sure how anyone could have surpassed Wiggins after a 21-game stretch like that.
Let’s not confuse boredom with competition.