Chris Herring’s 2022–23 NBA Awards Ballot
Welcome to NBA postseason, y’all.
In the weeks to come, my colleagues and I will keep you abreast of the playoff happenings with nightly breakdowns and analysis. To help focus on that coverage, we’ll be adjusting the weekly newsletter. As always, thank you so much for taking the time to subscribe to and read The Playmaker.
With us being in that strange week between the regular season and the playoffs, I figured it makes sense to share my season-long awards ballot, which I cast a few days ago. One quick note to start: To keep things a bit more uniform throughout, I didn’t include anyone on my ballot who played in fewer than 60 games. That nullified a number of massive names within the sport, but I also think it’s a pretty fair threshold.
Here’s how I voted, award by award, with brief explanations for each.
Clutch Player of the Year
- De’Aaron Fox, Kings
- Jimmy Butler, Heat
- Jalen Brunson, Knicks
I’m still not convinced we need an award for this, but shout-out to Fox for making the choice easy for this inaugural edition. He not only finished the season with three separate game-winning shots—one at Utah; a logo, half-court one at Orlando; and a game-deciding triple last month at Chicago—but also had a league-high 194 points in clutch scenarios for the most efficient offense in basketball history.
Coach of the Year
- Mike Brown, Kings
- Mark Daigneault, Thunder
- Jacque Vaughn, Nets
A no-brainer, this award should have a unanimous winner in Mike Brown, as he’s led Sacramento back to the playoffs for the first time since 2006. He unlocked an unstoppable offense with a roster no one expected much from. As for other guys who deserved consideration, the Grizzlies’ Taylor Jenkins, Celtics’ Joe Mazzulla and Cavs’ J.B. Bickerstaff were all folks I thought about toward the bottom of the ballot.
All-Rookie First Team
- G Jalen Williams, Thunder
- G Jaden Ivey, Pistons
- F Paolo Banchero, Magic
- F Keegan Murray, Kings
- C Walker Kessler, Jazz
All-Rookie Second Team
- G Shaedon Sharpe, Trail Blazers
- G Bennedict Mathurin, Pacers
- F Tari Eason, Rockets
- F Jabari Smith Jr., Rockets
- C Jalen Duren, Pistons
The first team is a pretty simple call. The second team not as much. I thought long and hard about including a number of guys like Pacers guard Andrew Nembhard, Hawks wing AJ Griffin and Hornets big man Mark Williams, along with the Spurs’ duo of Jeremy Sochan and Malaki Branham. Jaden Hardy was good in extended minutes after the All-Star break for the Mavs. (I couldn’t get there with Christian Braun of the Nuggets, despite his efficiency and consistent role with the West’s top seed.) Ultimately, the flashes I saw with Jabari Smith Jr. and Jalen Duren won me over with the last two spots.
All-Defensive First Team
- G Jrue Holiday, Bucks
- G Alex Caruso, Bulls
- F Giannis Antetokounmpo, Bucks
- F Jaren Jackson Jr., Grizzlies
- C Brook Lopez, Bucks
All-Defensive Second Team
- G Derrick White, Celtics
- G Herbert Jones, Pelicans
- F Jaden McDaniels, Timberwolves
- F Evan Mobley, Cavaliers
- C Bam Adebayo, Heat
This one—and Defensive Player of the Year—was tougher to decipher. Some players have great advanced metrics. Even with my 60-game threshold, some have played far more minutes than others. Some share the credit for their teams’ defensive dominance, making it a bit challenging to figure out how the individual accolades should be divvied up. But I felt good about the guards here, who are fantastic ball hawks that all play bigger than their frames. The bigs were impossible. (In particular, I feel awful about having left out the cerebral Draymond Green here, who, at 9.8 points better per 100 possessions better on defense, owns one of the best on-off differentials in the league for the Warriors. I tended to reward players who were part of elite defenses, which Golden State was not this season with Klay Thompson getting back to form and Andrew Wiggins out.)
Rookie of the Year
- Paolo Banchero, Magic
- Jalen Williams, Thunder
- Walker Kessler, Jazz
By looking like a No. 1 option and a star out of the gate, Banchero essentially took this award by the throat in the first week or two of the season. That said, if Oklahoma City makes the playoffs, I’d be so excited for Williams to get the national exposure he deserves. He’s so impactful and extremely well-rounded. The Thunder wouldn’t be in the play-in tournament without him. Similarly, the Jazz wouldn’t have sniffed contention without Kessler, who shot a league-best 72% while also finishing in the top five in total blocked shots. If you told me all three guys would end up being All-Stars within the next two years, I wouldn’t be surprised.
Most Improved Player
- Lauri Markkanen, Jazz
- Jalen Brunson, Knicks
- Mikal Bridges, Nets
Shai Gilgeous-Alexander wasn’t quite a superstar, but he had shown those flashes before this season with the Thunder. Brunson had an incredible stretch in the postseason without Luka Dončić last season and continued that trend with the Knicks. Bridges showed a more impressive scoring repertoire, even before heading to the Nets from the Suns. But more than anyone, Markkanen looked like a different player this season for the Jazz with different moves, 200 triples and a knack for devastating defenders with back cuts. This season, he also shot more than twice as many free throws (399) than he had in any other year.
Sixth Man of the Year
- Immanuel Quickley, Knicks
- Malcolm Brogdon, Celtics
- Bobby Portis, Bucks
This was more of a two-person race by the end. I went with Quickley, who’s been wildly impactful on offense—four games with 30 points since the start of March, albeit all in starting roles each time—while being good enough defensively, in my estimation, to deserve some All-Defensive Team consideration. The Knicks were 12 points better per 100 possessions on D with Quickley on the court, the best rate of any rotation player in the entire NBA. On the flip side, Boston was worse when Brogdon was on the floor without Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown. There’s little else Brogdon could have done—he hit almost 45% from three on 4.4 attempts—to earn the award, aside from perhaps play in more games. (Quickley played in 81 versus Brogdon’s 67, creating a gap of 600 minutes.) But even if Brogdon could play that much, his injury history alone might have made it unwise to do so.
Defensive Player of the Year
- Brook Lopez, Bucks
- Jaren Jackson Jr., Grizzlies
- Bam Adebayo, Heat
Speaking of minutes, I couldn’t quite wrap my mind around the idea of giving Jackson top billing for DPOY when he logged less than 1,800 for the season. The argument for him is he made so much happen in the time he did play. Both he and Lopez held opposing shooters about 13 percentage points beneath their normal field-goal percentages around the rim. But here was the difference: In playing about 600 more minutes than Jackson, Lopez defended 219 more of those near-the-rim tries. And while Lopez certainly had great defenders in Holiday and Antetokounmpo to lean on, the Bucks surrendered just 110.3 points per 100 possessions—about equivalent to the league-leading Cavs defense—when those two were on the sidelines and Lopez was on the court, per PBP Stats. His stout defense is an enormous part of how Milwaukee was able to survive the time without a healthy Khris Middleton in the early portions of the campaign.
All-NBA First Team
- G Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Thunder
- G Luka Dončić, Mavericks
- F Giannis Antetokounmpo, Bucks
- F Jayson Tatum, Celtics
- C Joel Embiid, 76ers
All-NBA Second Team
- G De’Aaron Fox, Kings
- G Donovan Mitchell, Cavaliers
- F Jaylen Brown, Celtics
- F Anthony Edwards, Timberwolves
- C Nikola Jokić, Nuggets
All-NBA Third Team
- G Ja Morant, Grizzlies
- G Jimmy Butler, Heat
- F Lauri Markkanen, Jazz
- F Julius Randle, Knicks
- C Domantas Sabonis, Kings
After a while, when you implement a hard-and-fast minimum of 60 games, the field gets a lot smaller. No KD. No LeBron. No AD. No Steph. No Harden. No Kawhi or PG. No Dame. No Haliburton. No KAT. It doesn’t mean the process is easy, necessarily. There’s still Kyrie Irving, Jalen Brunson, Jaren Jackson Jr., Pascal Siakam and Jrue Holiday. They all were great. But so was someone like Morant when he played. So I can live with these picks, even if other players made the choice a challenge. Anyway, figuring all that out means there’s just one award left.
MVP
Kyle Ross/USA TODAY Sports
- Joel Embiid, 76ers
- Nikola Jokić, Nuggets
- Giannis Antetokounmpo, Bucks
- Shai Gilgeous-Alexader, Thunder
- Jayson Tatum, Celtics
I hope this vote ends up close because it’s not a clear-cut case for anyone, in my opinion. In a nutshell, here’s why I went with Embiid: He is, without question, his team’s best, most dominant player on both sides of the floor and perhaps the most devastating scorer (and two-time reigning scoring champ) in the entire sport, someone capable of scoring 100 points in less than 24 hours’ time. He played without his second- and third-best players for a month and a month and a half, respectively, and not only pieced together the most efficient season of his career, but also kept his club within striking distance of one of the East’s top seeds while doing so. It was an argument similar to what bolstered last year’s winner, whom I readily voted for as my pick for MVP this time a year ago.
Embiid certainly isn’t the greatest passer in this conversation (or the greatest passer to ever play his position, like another candidate), but his passing is still quite good more often than not, evidenced by the fact that just about all his key teammates shoot the ball far better than their averages from beyond the arc when those looks stem from Embiid’s passes. He gets to the line whenever he feels like, and, in playing for a team that ended up in more close games than most clubs, Embiid cashed in on opportunities to put his stamp on contests that hung in the balance. From the All-Star break on, Embiid was a whopping plus-50 in 50 minutes of clutch time. He shot 18-for-18 from the line in those critical moments.
Will it all be enough to win him the award? We’ll see. But it was enough to narrowly land my vote, which I’d been on the fence about for about a month now.
Meat and potatoes: Good reads from SI and elsewhere this past week
Greg Nelson/Sports Illustrated (left); John W. McDonough/Sports Illustrated
• Steve Rushin had a Daily Cover story on the NBA’s favorite broadcasting siblings: Jeff and Stan Van Gundy.
• Chris Mannix wrote on the wild nature of the play-in tournament, and how this season’s parity will likely send the spectacle to new heights. He also wrote on the Clippers’ depth after a win over the Lakers.
• Rohan Nadkarni tallied his five key takeaways from the league’s new CBA, ranging from the rules around betting, luxury taxes and in-season tournament.
• Sports Illustrated has you covered in terms of breaking down the ugly sideline blowups on the final day of the regular season. Karl Rasmussen covered Minnesota big man Rudy Gobert striking teammate Kyle Anderson, and Nick Selbe has a write-up on Mason Plumlee and Bones Hyland briefly getting into it in the Clippers’ finale. And just when you thought things couldn’t get any worse for the Timberwolves, who will need a play-in victory to get into the playoffs, star wing defender Jaden McDaniels was ruled out for the rest of the season after breaking his right hand—an injury that stemmed from … his punching a wall in frustration. Jelani Scott wrote on that.
• Mannix, Nadkarni and I did a play-in roundtable, picking our favorites and analyzing which folks are facing the most pressure heading into those all-encompassing games.
• Mark Bechtel reviewed Air, a film that chronicles how Nike’s relationship with Michael Jordan was born.
• A fitting note for a section titled Meat and Potatoes: Robby Kalland of Uproxx had a hilarious post about Spurs wing Keldon Johnson nearly missing a game after having bad gas-station barbeque, a highly relatable mishap in the state of Texas.
• Also from Uproxx: Katie Heindl had a fun piece with Rockets wing Jalen Green in which he discussed the budgeting habits he’s maintained since his G League days, among other things.
• The Washington Post had another bombshell of sorts on Ja Morant last week: Police involved in his cases simply failed to interview any witnesses in a couple of the alleged cases involving the Grizzlies star. Gus Garcia-Roberts and Molly Hensley-Clancy reported that story.
