The Bizarro NBA Awards Of The 2018 Season

Later tonight the NBA world will gather what seems like 6 years after the 2018 season ended to celebrate the best of the best from this past season. We’ll get the MVP, the DPOY, the Coach of The Year, the 6th Man, and ROY just to name a few. Well I figured, since the good players will have their time in the spotlight later, why don’t we do a bizarro version and look who might win these awards if we were living in the Bizarro World. That’s right, I just made this up but it’s only fair that we look at both sides of the coin when it comes too evaluating the 2018 season.

A couple ground rules, in order for me to come up with these winners I had just one main requirement. You had to have played at least 50 games. I don’t know why I chose 50, it was honestly just a random number, but I felt like it was a large enough sample size where it could justify my winners. We’ll follow the same exact format as the real awards, with three finalists and ultimately one winner. So with that said, may I present to you the 2018 Bizarro NBA Awards

Least Improved Player

Candidates: Andrew Wiggins, Marcus Smart, Carmelo Anthony

What you thought this was going to be easy? Our three finalists all present a strong case. First we have Andrew Wiggins, so signed his huge extension early in the year with the promise that he would in fact actually improve. Nope, that didn’t happen. Then we have Marcus Smart who couldn’t stop tweeting out videos of his shot being fixed all summer, only for him to continue to be one of the worst shooters in NBA history. And finally we have Melo, who much like Smart gave us all a sense of false hope with all the Hoodie Melo bullshit on social media, only to be maybe the worst player in the entire league last year. As you can see we have very tough competition for our first award.

Winner: Carmelo Anthony

Look the proof is in the pudding. Wiggins may have plataued, and Smart may have proven he’ll never learn to shoot, but few players took a dive from one year to the next in terms of their improvement like Melo did last year. A career low in FG%, a career low in points, a career low in assists, a career low in steals, the third highest Drtg of his career paired with the 3rd lowest Ortg, the lowest TS% of his career, the lowest FTr of his career, the lowest assist% of his career, I mean everywhere you looked it was nights and nights like this

And while we know Melo gives two shits because his checks still clear, he is the unfortunate winner of our first award.

Worst 6th Man Of The Year Award

Candidates: Joe Johnson, Malik Monk, Emmanuel Mudiay

A good 6th man can make all the difference to an NBA roster. You have a player who can really make an impact as the first player off the bench and it often times brings your team to another level. You look at all the best teams in the league, and they usually employ a legit 6th man option. Well, that’s not the case with every team, so to decide who I would award as the worst 6th man of the year I looked at players that averaged right around 20 minutes a night as the floor and these were the three worst I could find. For Joe Johnson it’s not really his fault, he’s like a billion years old and simply is no longer efficient. Malik Monk had a rough rookie year to put it kindly, especially when you factor in how the rest of this past rookie class looked. And with Mudiay, I mean I think every Nuggets fan out there will agree with him being in this group and understand completely.

Winner: Emmanuel Mudiay

To be honest I almost had two Knicks on this list, but I gave Frankie Nicotine the benefit of the doubt since he’s still a legit defender despite being offensively challenged. And the fact that he’s still young and this blog can only have so many former/current Knicks in it. I went with Mudiay even though he technically started 14 games for the Knicks, I still considered him a bench player for much of the 2018 season. There was a thought that maybe he just needed a change in scenery, that perhaps playing at MSG would turn his career around and well, it didn’t. He started the year in DEN averaging 8.5 points on 40/37% splits and once he got to New York and saw his minutes increase to 22.4 a night nothing got better. In fact things got worse. His stats as a Knick are gross, averaging 8.8 points on 36/19% splits with a Drtg of 111. It’s hard to find a guard that got as much run as Mudiay this past year off the bench that was as bad at the game of basketball as he was, so congratulations!

Worst Coach Of The Year

Candidates: Stan Van Gundy, Thibs, Ty Lue

Now this is tricky because to be the worst coach you’re probably already fired. In my mind these three guys stand out for a number of reasons, but mainly because of their underachievement. Remember, the Pistons got off to that great start only to flame out after like the first month and never were seen from again. Thibs has all this fucking talent in MIN and barely made the goddamn playoffs. Then Ty Lue, I mean come on that goes without saying. I’m sure you may have expected maybe Earl Watson from PHX before he got canned, or whoever they trolled out in ORL or SAC but to me there’s only so much you can do with no talent in this league which is why I put way more stock into poor coaching when you don’t get it done even once you actually have players.

Winner: Thibs

Not only do his players hate him, but he his literally killing his own roster. Nobody loves to run his talent into the ground like Thibs does, it’s almost as if nobody ever explained to him that you can in fact make substitutions in an NBA game. You could say the Wolves made progress because they made the playoffs and actually won a game, but if you’re honest with yourself MIN underachieved given their talent. I know Butler got hurt, but the fact that KAT basically never got to shoot the ball, and Wiggins went backwards in his development was too glaring for me to pass up. I have a lot of friends from college when are from MIN and they cannot stand the guy which is good enough for me. There is this notion that Thibs is a good coach, and I’m sure that’s true, he may just not be the best head coach. It seems to me like his players tune him out and he refuses to adjust his strategy in order to make his team successful.

Worst Defensive Player Of The Year

Candidates: Elfrid Payton, Zach Randolph, JR Smith

Remember, you had to at least play 50 games in order to qualify, and for these candidates I looked at guys who actually played real minutes. I almost want to give Zach Randolph a pass, mostly because he’s a dinosaur but also because frankly he scares me a little bit. The other two are guys you would expect to not really be engaged on the defensive end, and luckily for this award we can go straight to the numbers. The player in the NBA who had the highest Drtg while playing at least 50 games and nearly 30 minutes a night was……

Winner: Elfrid Payton

No surprise the Suns cut Payton over the weekend eh? Did you know PHX employed two of the worst defenders in the whole league with Payton and Troy Daniels? Probably not because you don’t watch a lot of Suns basketball but it’s true. Their defense stunk out loud and their issues on the perimeter had a lot to do with it. For Payton, 2018 marked the highest Drtg season of his career (113), and that’s probably not the best thing to have happen when you’re in line for a new contract, hence the release.

Least Valuable Player

Candidates: Dwight Howard, Jason Terry , Cristiano Felicio

If the MVP is supposed to celebrate the best players from that given year, it’s only right that the LVP celebrates some of the worst motherfuckers this league has to offer. I don’t see how you could go with anyone over these finalists here, with all three more than deserving. There are for sure worse players in the league than those listed, but remember the GP requirement. This eliminated guys like Noah and Deng who are definitely the worst players currently. But for those who actually played 50 games, this his still a worthy list.

Winner: Cristiano Felicio

If you have no idea who this is, he’s a big man for the Bulls that played 55 games this past season at right around 18 minutes a night. How bad was Felico? He has a -18.0 net rating which was the the worst mark in the league this year. In other words, no player did more harm to his own team the second he stepped on the floor than Felicio. He was nearly 5 points worse than the next player (ZBo), and maybe when you think about it the Bulls could have been even higher in the Lottery if they actually played him more. Kind of a miss by Hoiberg there if you ask me.

And that’s it, congratulations to all the winners and nominees of the 2018 Bizarro NBA Awards, may you not find yourself in this position again next season (jk almost all of them surely will). But I’m curious, would you have gone in any other direction? Think someone should have been a finalist that wasn’t included? Why work when we can talk about this together on the internet. Let me hear your thoughts.