Early season awards for the Los Angeles Lakers

With one-third of the NBA season in the books, let’s take a look at the standout players for the Los Angeles Lakers.

The Los Angeles Lakers have played around one-third of their regular season schedule this season, and find themselves right around the same record they had last year. This was expected to be the case for the Lakers this season, given their youthful roster and the competition that comes with playing in the Western Conference.

Now that we have a decent sample size of games to judge from, I figured it would be a good time to hand out some awards for the early part of the season. The Lakers have been relatively healthy outside of Larry Nance Jr. missing four weeks with a fractured hand, so the whole roster is in play for these honors.

The ones I will be choosing are Most Valuable Player, Defensive Player of the Early Season, Sixth Man of the Early Season and Rookie of the Early Season. These are four of the main awards handed out at the end of the season, and the Lakers present multiple suitors for each category.

The omitted awards had their reasons for me not picking them. Luke Walton is the only one in the running for Coach of the Year, so no point in hitting that subject. I felt that everybody on the team except for a player or two have made positive strides this season, so Most Improved Player fits the whole team. And nobody has really anything drastic to overcome to award a Comeback Player of the Year award.

A player could be chosen for multiple awards; it just happened to work out that each honor had a different winner. Let’s begin with the Rookie of the Early Season.