Trae Young climbs NBA Most Improved Player Ladder
By Phil Watson
The last 4 weeks have seen a huge shakeup on the NBA Most Improved Player Ladder, with no one making a bigger climb than Trae Young of the Atlanta Hawks.
In the four weeks since the last look at the NBA Most Improved Player Ladder, there have been some massive changes. Three players have entirely dropped off the ladder and two other players that remained on a rung saw some dramatic rises and falls.
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The last four weeks encompass most of the month of January — a period of the NBA schedule coach Doc Rivers of the LA Clippers told the Los Angeles Times is known as the “dog days.”
Focus becomes more difficult as the season grinds through its halfway point. The big Christmas Day slate of games is finished and teams can find themselves in a slog toward the All-Star break and some of the outcomes can be surprising. Rivers’ Clippers lost at home to the Grizzlies by 26 points while also taking losses at Atlanta and to the Kings.
But LA was hardly alone in the “wait, they lost to who?” category over the last four weeks.
Trae Young of the Atlanta Hawks was the big mover up the ladder since the last time we looked at the race for NBA Most Improved Player honors and though Atlanta is tied for the worst record in the Eastern Conference, it won six of its 14 games over that period, nearly half of the club’s 13 victories thus far on the season.
Included in that run were wins over playoff-bound teams such as the Pacers, Clippers and 76ers.
As previously mentioned, three players dropped off the ladder entirely as they were swallowed up by Rivers’ dog days. Jaylen Brown of the Boston Celtics was third when the ladder was presented on Jan. 4, Duncan Robinson of the Miami Heat was fourth and Andrew Wiggins of the Minnesota Timberwolves was on the sixth rung.
Brown struggled with some nagging injuries over the last month, Robinson’s production tailed off and Wiggins returned to being, well, Andrew Wiggins as the free-falling Timberwolves put together their second losing streak of at least 10 games since Dec. 1. That streak — which reached 10 games on Monday — is still active.
As for the players on the ladder, only two are in the same positions they occupied four weeks ago. Everything else got shuffled significantly, with one player dropping two spots and another rising four rungs. Some players who weren’t even on the radar four weeks ago have picked up their pace. One of those players, Sviatoslav Mykhailiuk of the Detroit Pistons, didn’t quite get onto the ladder.
But another newcomer to the race did grab a rung. So let’s see what remains once the music stopped and everyone scrambled for a chair. A reminder this ladder contains seven spots — based on the average of around seven players per season that have gotten first-place votes for MIP over the last five years.