NBA awards are fun and important, but they’re not worth talking about this early in the season. So far, they’ve blissfully not been brought up much.
There was a legitimate cause to be worried about the NBA last season. Not because of the Golden State Warriors being so good, or because of more and more stars joining together or anything like that. No, the cause for concern was that buzz about the Rookie of the Year race would never falter.
Proponents for both Ben Simmons and Donovan Mitchell, plus some Jayson Tatum acolytes, sung their guys’ praises incessantly. It was ridiculous, and it followed up a contentious MVP race the prior season that saw Russell Westbrook win controversially while sparking a triple-double debate in the process.
Both award races went from chances to hear good cases on both sides to annoying pretty quickly, and it felt like they dragged on for much of the regular season. Blissfully, aside from a little Giannis Antetokounmpo for MVP and Luka Doncic for Rookie of the Year chatter, awards haven’t felt as ever-present thus far.
We, as NBA fans, writers, or whatever else, need to work to keep it that way. There are a time and place for award discussion, but it’s not until the season is much older. More importantly, there needs to be more to talk about than simply which players are going to win which awards.
One reason we’ve avoided some of this might be that the season has had more intrigue so far. The Golden State Warriors are apparently crumbling, the Eastern Conference is wide open, and suspected juggernauts in Boston and Houston have stumbled out of the gate. There’s a lot of stuff to talk about!
There will be room to explain why Doncic should be the unanimous ROTY later, and I’ll look forward to reading those articles and hearing those takes. Well, a couple of them anyway. Just as long as there’s not a deluge to sift through on the ol’ timeline every day.
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