In advance of the NBA awards being announced, we here at Hoops Habit conducted our own vote for the awards. Giannis Antetokounmpo may well be the big winner.
The NBA had an unprecedented season in countless ways this year. Even aside from the coronavirus pandemic that sidelined the league for more than four months, it dealt with great losses like the deaths of Kobe Bryant and former commissioner David Stern. In a way, it only seems appropriate that the NBA awards would be presented in an unprecedented fashion as well.
This season the NBA bubble was treated as its own entity, separate from the regular season when it comes to awards. Players on the 22 teams in the bubble had their own awards and the stats and performances from those games did not count towards the regular awards. In essence, the NBA awards were decided on March 11th when the league suspended its season.
While the league will soon announce its own awards, we here at Hoops Habit conducted our own award ballots. We had a total of 36 respondents from our staff, voting on MVP, Rookie of the Year, Coach of the Year, Sixth Man of the Year, Defensive Player of the Year, the three All-NBA teams, two All-Defensive teams and an All-Rookie team.
We’re as eager as anybody to see how the NBA media votes turn out, and we can count on some bizarre results if some of the released ballots we’ve seen are any indication. As for us, we’ll see if we can do even better than the voting media.
Our awards will start with the big ones.