The 'And Now for Something Completely Different' Awards, Part 2
You already know Stephen Curry and Paul George secured Player of the Month honors, and you're well aware that Luke Walton and David Blatt were the top coaches in November. But you probably don't know who took home the Crazy Pills Award, do you?
Seriously, congrats to the conventional award-winners. Well deserved, fellas.
But if you'll excuse the departure from the norm, there are weirder, less-celebrated, admittedly fictional trophies to administer.
And if handing these out helps canvas the strange but important things going on in the NBA over the past few weeks, all the better.
It's the Little Things Award
Winner: Boban Marjanovic
We like ball fakes around here, and we like little-used, mostly unknown 7'3" centers nearly as much. So when you get the opportunity to feature both in the same highlight, it's pretty easy to peg the combination as award-worthy.
San Antonio Spurs center Boban Marjanovic got Jahlil Okafor twice in one play during a 51-point thwacking on Monday, hitting him with two fully palmed ball fakes to nonexistent backdoor cutters, traveling three or four times in the process and then shooting what can only be described as the first flat-footed fadeaway in league history.
If only for the physics-defying aspect of that last part (how do you fade away while standing still?!), Marjanovic would have won this one. That he scored a career-high 18 points in the game only makes the story better.
Marjanovic barely plays, and we can't in good conscience spin this isolated clip into any kind of argument that he'll impact the Spurs in a big way going forward. What we can do, though, is hold it up as an example of what happens when teams implement the kind of big-picture process that seeks out unheralded assets and develops them. No other team in the league pegged the 27-year-old Marjanovic as a rosterable commodity, but the Spurs did.
San Antonio is so stable, so slavishly devoted to its principles that it can introduce the strangest ingredients to the mix and still expect good results.
Faith in and patience for a process. Interesting...
The Freak Out and Give Up Award
Winner: Philadelphia 76ers
The Philadelphia 76ers probably don't want this award, but then, the recent decision to hire Jerry Colangelo as some kind of overseer (he's watching you, Sam Hinkie) proves we can't always get what we want.
Hiring Colangelo as a special advisor and chairman of basketball operations was a clear signal that the Sixers' ownership is only into trusting a process if it gets results quickly—which isn't really trust at all. After a little more than two years of Hinkie's unabashed teardown plan, the addition of Colangelo signals the hasty departure of patience.
The Sacramento Kings' catastrophe of a rebuild has been going on for a decade, and they haven't finished higher than 11th in their conference during that span. Would you rather have the 76ers' assets, clean books and draft picks as a starting point for the next five years, or Sacramento's?
Two years of losing, regardless of the severity, is nothing in the NBA. Most of the teams currently occupying the upper reaches of contention lost for much longer than two years. Maybe the only difference is that they were less open about their intentions.
If it's true that other owners lobbied for commissioner Adam Silver to intervene—per ESPN.com's Brian Windhorst—that's horrible, but it at least somewhat absolves Philadelphia ownership for the Colangelo decision. Either way, it's still a major bummer that we may not get to see the eventual outcome of a truly bold and theoretically sound plan.
The Sixers cracked.
The Accept No Substitutes Award
Winners: Draymond Green and Stephen Curry
We love to talk about how the NBA is a copycat league, how every successful model spawns reproductions designed to equal or improve on the prototype. But Stephen Curry knows his Warriors are different.
He knows imitation is hopeless, and he told Sam Alipour of ESPN The Magazine as much:
"You can try to copy it, but you won't have the personnel. There isn't another Draymond Green, another Klay, another Andre. If you put your small-ball lineup next to ours, we like our chances."
All true, even if Curry didn't include himself.
There are so many different ways to analyze the Warriors' incredible start, but it's easy to look past the most obvious source of their dominance: They just have better players than everyone else.
Defining talent can be tricky because context matters. But if you look at the objective skill sets of Golden State's best players, it's hard to ignore just how obviously robust and rare they are.
There'll be plenty of attempts to mimic the Warriors' personnel and style; Curry's right about that, and teams should do what they can to copy aspects of such a successful enterprise.
Just don't expect it to work.
The Crazy Pills Award
Winner: Byron Scott
This could alternatively be titled the Piling On Award, but at the risk of overkill, it's just too difficult to deny Byron Scott the crown.
Here's the explanation Scott had for pulling Julius Randle and D'Angelo Russell from the starting lineup, via Mike Bresnahan of the Los Angeles Times:
"This change wasn’t so much based on them not performing up to their capability. It’s based on where we are as a team. We’re 3-17, so obviously it’s not working. So I wanted to get some new blood in there, some fresh blood, and see how those guys play.
"
Which brings us to this:
Neither Randle nor Russell were pleased with their demotions, so job well done ticking off two of the only current roster pieces who figure to matter in the Lakers' future.
The real issue here is the lack of a clear goal. Scott seems to want the Lakers to win games, but if that's true, how does he justify playing Kobe Bryant? And, big picture, why should L.A., which loses its pick in this year's draft if it falls outside the top three, want to win at all?
Nothing makes sense here, and if the Lakers hope to salvage anything from this lost season, they'd better find a way to develop their young talent without detracting from their other organizational aims.
Whatever those are...
Runner-Up: Kobe Bryant
I'll just leave this from ESPN's Baxter Holmes here:
That's a quote from a player taking 17.8 shots per game with an effective field-goal percentage of 35.3—worst in the league for anyone taking that many shots, per Basketball-Reference.com.
Not a lot else to say on this, folks.
The Necessity Is the Mother of Invention Award
Winner: Washington Wizards' Small-Ball Lineup
It's probably not sustainable, and it's almost impossible to imagine it working in a long playoff series, but the Washington Wizards' undersized lineup is doing some interesting things.
Like beating the Miami Heat, an Eastern Conference powerhouse with one of the most formidable big frontcourts in the league. Hassan Whiteside spent the fourth quarter of a Dec. 7 loss to the Wizards on the bench, as head coach Erik Spoelstra was uncomfortable sending him out to guard center (yes, center) Jared Dudley.
Washington has only gone to such an extreme lately because Nene and Drew Gooden are hurt and Marcin Gortat has been away from the team tending to a family matter in Poland. But it's interesting that the Wizards talked a big game about going smaller and spreading the floor over the summer, couldn't do it with their typical personnel early in the season, and only now are having success with it because they've got no other option.
A couple of Dudley-at-center lineups have had major success in small samples this year: A unit featuring John Wall, Bradley Beal, Otto Porter and Gary Neal has posted a net rating of plus-35.8 in 13 minutes. Another substituting Garrett Temple for Neal is at plus-26.9 in eight minutes, per NBA.com.
If this is a way for Washington to force key opposing players off the floor, look out. Because when Wall has room to operate and no rim-protectors to worry about, he's as hard to stop as any guard in the league.
Nice work on this one, Wizards.
The 'Thank You, Sir, May I Have Another?' Award
Winner: Karl-Anthony Towns
We celebrated DeMarcus Cousins and Anthony Davis for developing three-point shots last time around, but this is something different.
Karl-Anthony Towns seems to have arrived in the NBA with a ready-made long-range stroke, putting him miles ahead of those two superstars in a key area. Towns hit three triples in a Dec. 7 loss to the Los Angeles Clippers, bumping up his season total to seven makes in 15 tries.
If that doesn't warrant a higher-volume approach, I'm not sure what does.
More of this, please. Much, much more.
The Scary Learning Curve Award
Winner: Hassan Whiteside
Yes, Whiteside was rendered rotationally obsolete against that Wizards lineup we mentioned earlier, but maybe there's a reason to rethink that approach next time the situation arises. Because, although there's little Whiteside can do to improve his defense against smaller players out in space, his growing offensive game could punish smaller lineups badly enough to force a more conventional approach.
According to Synergy Sports, Whiteside has dramatically improved as a cutter and is now nearly unstoppable as a roll man:
Smaller lineups typically combat the pick-and-roll by switching, but that didn't work in the clip above. And Whiteside's cutting numbers show he's now able to just saunter underneath for easy looks. No amount of switching can stop him from simply being huge and running to high-efficiency spots.
If his gains in a couple of important offensive areas hold up, Whiteside could be one of the few big men in the league capable of thwarting undersized opponents.
Stats accurate through games played by Dec. 7.
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