The 2020-21 NBA ‘Season Just Started’ Awards

The NBA season is not even a month old but the award picture is already coming into focus. Here are the players who should win each award if the season ended today.

Obsessing over awards is often a misguided way to analyze and follow sports. Even in a game like basketball, that champions individualism and star power, taking one’s time and appreciating a wealth of quality players that populate the league we all follow is the smart choice.

But talking about award races is also pretty fun.

My favorite way to embrace such rhetoric is with my annual TNSJS column — short for “The NBA Season Just Started Awards”. Ever since I first started blogging back in 2017 I’ve published a piece in which I hand out the six most well-known awards if for some reason the NBA season ended after only two weeks (some of the earlier renditions were done after a single NBA weekend, but I have since grown more lenient).

Due to my connecting with more great basketball minds in the past year (and my recognizing that I am an idiot who shouldn’t be trusted with award-giving autonomy), I enlisted the help of nine fine people as a voting panel for the awards. You should follow all of these good and smart people on their Twitter accounts listed below.

The voters: @MattEsposito_, @MavsDraft, @MSchindlerNBA, @DavidEarly, @TEastNBA, @theNBAundrgrnd, @lawlorpalooza, @TomWestNBA, @AZSportsZone

(Of note: I had these guys vote from Thursday to Saturday of this past week, meaning that the potentially crucial games of the past few days were not taken into account. Blame me for not publishing this earlier, and blame how long on moving back into my college dorm this weekend).