Early-season award picks are fun, but historically speaking, they’re rarely predictive. A little less than a year ago, I made quarter-season award picks for the 2023-24 campaign. Of the six major awards I picked, only one of my winners (Rudy Gobert for Defensive Player of the Year) ultimately took home his trophy at the end of the season. It’s becoming rarer and rarer that any award winner goes wire-to-wire as the favorite. Even Gobert had to fight off a furious late-season surge from Victor Wembanyama to earn his fourth Defensive Player of the Year award.
So why dive into the races at all so early? Because it’s a useful snapshot. We have a big enough sample with one month of games in the books that we can (mostly) disregard our preseason preconceptions, but the season is still young enough for these races to be malleable. Narratives haven’t formed yet. In many cases, consensus favorites haven’t emerged. These picks are, more than anything, a starting point. So without further ado, below are my picks for the NBA’s six major awards after the first month of play. They may wind up being wrong down the line, but hopefully, they serve as a useful barometer for where things stood when the races began in earnest.
Most Valuable Player
Jayson Tatum is checking every MVP box so far. Since 2011, every MVP has gone to a player between the ages of 24 and 28 that made either First- or Second-Team All-NBA. That’s Tatum. Every MVP since 2008 has averaged at least 25 points per game except for Stephen Curry in 2015, who only didn’t because he got pulled out of so many blowouts early. Tatum is a hair below 30 right now. Looking for versatility? Tatum leads his team in assists and rebounds. Winning? The Celtics are on a 66-win pace. Narrative? Easy, he was just the best player on a championship team and has nothing left to prove. By basically every traditional measure, Tatum looks like an MVP. In a normal year, he’d have a real chance to win it.
But as it stands right now, through no fault of his own, he’s headed for a very impressive second-place finish. Nikola Jokic is lapping the field.
Through 10 games so far this season, Jokic leads the NBA in 3-point percentage, assists per game and rebounds per game. That has never happened before. It’s never come close to happening before. Nobody’s ever led the league in two of those categories before. He has more games with a triple-double (six) than without one (four). Remember when Russell Westbrook won an MVP by averaging a triple-double? Well, he shot roughly 43-34-85 in that season. Jokic is at 56-56-84. He’s scoring at roughly the same rate as Tatum (29.7 points per game), just more efficiently.
Those are the box score stats. The deeper you dig, the crazier this Jokic season gets. Jokic may be more responsible for his team’s success than any player in NBA history. He’s touching the ball, on average, 115.8 times per game. The previous league record, which he himself set, was 101.1. When he is on the court, the Nuggets score 125.8 points per 100 possessions. That would be the most efficient offense in NBA history over the full season. When he’s off of the floor, they score 92.1 points per 100 possessions. Over a full season, that would be the worst offense the NBA has seen in more than 20 years. Jokic has never played with a teammate chosen for an All-Star Game. There’s little reason to believe that will change this season. Jamal Murray is having his worst shooting season since he was a rookie. Michael Porter Jr. is shooting like Kevin Durant in first halves and then falls below 40% from the floor in the second. The Nuggets are, more than they’ve ever been, the Jokic show.
The advanced metrics are, as always, preposterous. Jokic is generating .323 win shares per 48 minutes. The gap between him at No. 2 Ty Jerome (we’ll get to him later!) is the same as the gap between Jerome and No. 15 Jalen Williams. In Box Plus-Minus, Jokic sits atop the league at plus-15.3. Nobody else is above plus-10.
And so, with apologies to Tatum, there simply isn’t an MVP race right now. Jokic wins unless his performance meaningfully declines or he fails to play 65 games. Tatum is having a standard MVP-caliber season. There is nothing standard about what Jokic is doing. The closest modern comparison right now is the run LeBron James went on from 2009 through 2013. James won four MVPs out of five, and any reasonable interrogation of Derrick Rose’s 2011 trophy suggests that James should have taken five straight. That’s where Jokic is headed, conveniently with the same, preposterous missing trophy in the middle (in his case, courtesy of Joel Embiid).
Anthony Davis comfortably holds the No. 3 slot right now, and his resume, like Tatum’s, would merit serious MVP consideration in any other season. He’s the NBA’s second-leading scorer with extremely efficient shooting numbers and All-Defense-caliber work as possibly the only true positive on an otherwise moribund Laker defense. Tatum gets the nod due to his greater responsibility as a shot creator, but if Jokic didn’t exist, Davis would have a reasonable claim to the top spot. His roster isn’t nearly as talented as Tatum’s and he’s working with a rookie head coach. This might be the best season Davis has ever had. He’s just not as good as Jokic.
Defensive Player of the Year
- Victor Wembanyama
- Dyson Daniels
- OG Anunoby
The front-runner for this award easily could have been Chet Holmgren had he stayed healthy. His hip injury all but ensures he won’t play 65 games, though, so the best player on the best team defense is more or less out of the race. That creates a compelling race between, at least thus far this season, the league’s best rim-protector and its best perimeter defender.
On a regular-season basis at least, there is no trait more valuable to a defender than rim-protection. There’s a reason bigs win this award almost every year, and Wembanyama is living up to the ridiculous standard he set near the basket a season ago. Once again, he leads the NBA in block rate by a country mile at 10.6%. Opposing shooters are shooting 38.8% within six feet of the basket with Wembanyama as the closest defender, according to NBA.com tracking data. Let’s put that number in perspective: your odds of making a shot in the paint against Wembanyama are roughly the same as Scotty Pippen Jr.’s odds of making a 3-pointer this season.
The Spurs rank eighth in defense thus far this season, and remember, this isn’t exactly a roster loaded with defensive talent. The roster is mostly quite young, and where it’s old, it’s old (see Chris Paul). The Spurs give up five more points per 100 possessions when Wembanyama is on the bench, but that number is misleading because of some very bad shooting luck. Spurs opponents make 37% of their 3s when Wembanyama is on the floor, but 31.8% when he’s out. As the opponent’s 3-point percentage is mostly random, the true on-off split is closer to double-digits. He makes a defense that would probably be bad without him quite good.
The same isn’t quite true for Dyson Daniels, but to be fair, nobody’s ever been able to lift a Trae Young defense. Daniels has found an efficient workaround: Young can’t hurt your defense if you just steal the ball before the offense can attack him. Daniels is having one of the best turnover-generating seasons in NBA history. Daniels leads the NBA with 3.1 steals per game, and before back-to-back games without steals, he was on pace to break Alvin Robertson’s single-season record of 3.7. He has 96 total deflections through 14 games. Only seven other players are even halfway there.
Elite turnover generation often comes in one of two ways. There’s the Shai Gilgeous-Alexander school of racking up steals which basically amounts to playing with so many other elite defenders that you can afford to gamble. Obviously, that’s not the case for Daniels. And then there’s the Allen Iverson version, which basically means to be a bad defender who gambles because he just doesn’t have any other function on the defense. That’s not Daniels either. He’s doing this defending opposing stars. He’s held Jayson Tatum, De’Aaron Fox, Jalen Brunson, Cade Cunningham and Gilgeous-Alexander below 50% shooting from the field already this season. It’s exceedingly rare for a perimeter defender to generate enough defensive value to meaningfully factor into this race. It’s just too easy to keep them out of the play, whereas rim-protectors more or less set the terms of engagement for an offense. But Daniels is taking the hardest matchups the league has to throw at him and generating historic turnover numbers. Doing both gets you in the race.
Holmgren’s absence from the race makes picking a bronze medalist fairly difficult. Most of the obvious candidates have a red flag of some sort. Draymond Green looks like Draymond Green again, but Golden State’s defense is dominating mostly during the Kyle Anderson minutes. In truth, their defensive success is collective. There are a number of viable candidates for this award on a per-minute basis that just haven’t played enough. If Alex Caruso, Jonathan Isaac, Gary Payton II, Tari Eason or Anderson played 30 minutes, they’d be in the thick of this race. They don’t. So we defer to two stalwarts carrying otherwise bad defenses on their backs: Anthony Davis and OG Anunoby.
Ultimately, the defense the Lakers play when Davis is on the floor is just too damning to put him on the ballot. The Lakers are allowing fewer points with him on the bench, and unlike Wembanyama’s case, that’s happening with opponents making way more 3s when he sits. In a single possession, you still might take Davis over anyone. Consistency is the issue. It’s unfair to ask a single player to make this putrid group of point-of-attack defenders great, but viable would at least be nice. The Lakers rank 25th in defense.
When the Knicks landed Mikal Bridges and Karl-Anthony Towns, they did so assuming the pairing of Bridges and Anunoby on the perimeter would be so good that it could protect Towns, a very limited rim-protector. Bridges has been a major defensive disappointment, and that has put even more pressure on Anunoby to carry an otherwise limited group of defenders. He’s handling it better than the Knicks could have hoped. He leads all non-centers in contested shots per game, and he is one of very few defenders in all of basketball capable of guarding all five positions not just on switches, but across full games. A healthy Holmgren bumps Anunoby off of the ballot, but for now, he’s got a slim lead for third place.
Rookie of the Year
We can keep this one pretty straightforward. Jared McCain holds the record for most points scored in his first four starts (103) in NBA history. He’s been the one bright spot in an otherwise dismal year for the 76ers. We knew he could shoot coming into the season. His ability to create offense at all three levels is a pleasant surprise. Nick Nurse is running offense through him regardless of which of his stars are healthy on a given night. Landing Tyrese Maxey at No. 21 in 2020 was a franchise-altering post-lottery pick. McCain at No. 16 is trending in that direction. His defense still leaves plenty to be desired, but hey, he’s a rookie. What do you expect?
Our next two picks are older rookies who have more or less performed as advertised. Zach Edey still has a lot of work to do on defense (for starters, can you calm down with the fouls, Zach?), but he’s been a very useful low-minutes scorer for Memphis that has brought back the offensive rebounding left behind by Steven Adams and Jonas Valanciunas. There are still very real questions about his playoff viability, but thus far, he’s been a pretty helpful weapon for the Grizzlies in small doses.
Dalton Knecht has become an extremely useful weapon for the Lakers in whatever dosage is asked of him. The only reason he hasn’t risen to No. 2 is sample. In the four games since JJ Redick put him in the starting lineup, he’s averaging just under 24 points and has made 19 3-pointers. He is exactly the sort of movement shooter the Lakers have lacked throughout the LeBron James-Anthony Davis era, and he can do more than enough off of the dribble to punish defenders who close out too hard. If he hadn’t shot 39-29-100 in his first 10 games, he’d have No. 2 locked up. It’s just too early to say whether this is a hot shooting streak or something more indicative of the role he’ll be able to hold for the Lakers all season. He’s on his way to silver if he keeps shooting like he has, though.
Most Improved Player
- Franz Wagner
- Norm Powell
- Ty Jerome
The Most Improved Player award has more or less become the first-time All-Star award. It’s a trend I tend to disagree with, but that’s a matter of personal taste. Generally speaking, first-time All-Stars are high draft picks growing along their anticipated trajectory. My preferred Most Improved candidate is a player we didn’t expect to become a high-level contributor. This season, at least thus far, has been the rare exception. Franz Wagner is well on his way to his first All-Star selection, but it wasn’t predictable. Wagner has never been this caliber of shot-creator.
Wagner is averaging 25.4 points and 6.3 assists since Paolo Banchero got hurt at the end of October. The shooting numbers aren’t especially efficient, but think about who he’s playing with here. Even at full strength, the Magic are a relatively deficient offensive team. Orlando’s second-leading scorer without Banchero is Jalen Suggs, who is shooting 39-26-92 in that span. Their only other double-digit scorer without Banchero is the other Wagner brother, Mo, and yet, with Wagner on the floor this month, the Magic are scoring at roughly the rate of the No. 20 offense in the NBA.
That’s not good, exactly, but it’s enough when your best player is hurt and your defense is spectacular. Orlando has won seven of its last eight, and Wagner is really the only shot-creator they have. Virtually everything is running through him. He has almost no space and no ball-handling help, but he’s still surviving Banchero’s absence. This is the sort of All-Star leap that legitimately alters a team’s trajectory. Wagner was practically an offensive zero against Cleveland in the playoffs a year ago. If this is who he’s going to be moving forward, especially when you factor in how comfortable he is scaling his volume down when Banchero is healthy, the Magic can harbor legitimate long-term championship aspirations. They have two stars now.
Powell is closer to the sort of candidate I typically gravitate towards. How often does a 31-year-old set a new career scoring high? Powell is the leading scorer for a Clippers team that isn’t quite as bereft offensively as the Magic, but doesn’t have much ball-handling after James Harden. The Clippers haven’t won a game by more than 12 points this season because they just don’t have the firepower to separate. But Powell is averaging 26.3 points in their six single-digit wins this season. If his flamethrower runs cold or even warm, the Clippers can’t score enough to win.
And there’s Ty Jerome, the poster boy for the old score rags-to-riches winners. Jerome is an absolute metrics darling. As we covered, he ranks second in the entire NBA in terms of Win Shares per 48 Minutes. He leads a 16-1 Cavaliers team in Box Plus-Minus and has generated more VORP than Donovan Mitchell, Darius Garland or Evan Mobley. These things tend to happen when you make 55% of your 3s, but if hitting shots was all it took to compete for this award, Sam Merrill might’ve won it a year ago. Jerome has more than three times as many assists as he does turnovers. He’s an excellent turnover generator on defense, leading the rotation in steals and deflections per minute. He’s gone from a fringe rotation player with his first three teams to a legitimate Sixth Man of the Year candidate in Cleveland.
He doesn’t play enough to win the award. When the shooting inevitably regresses to something resembling the mean, he’s going to fall out of the picture. In April, starters like Daniels or Christian Braun will almost certainly have better cases than Jerome. For now, though, his emergence has been one of the biggest stories of the season for the NBA’s best team by record. Cleveland wouldn’t be ahead of Boston in the standings right now if not for Ty Jerome.
Sixth Man of the Year
- Payton Pritchard
- Buddy Hield
- Ty Jerome
We’ve covered Jerome’s bonafides already, and on a per-minute basis, he has a reasonable argument against any bench player in the NBA. But he only plays 18.5 minutes per game for a Cleveland team absolutely loaded with guards. That’s just not enough playing time to win the award. It’s also probably what keeps Jonathan Isaac—arguably the NBA’s best per-minute defender—off of the ballot for the time being.
Pritchard and Hield play more, with Pritchard playing nearly starters minutes for a Boston team still missing Kristaps Porzingis. While Pritchard doesn’t exactly do the same things that Porzingis does, he’s injected the Boston bench with more than enough spare shot-creation to weather the Porzingis storm. His playmaking is down this season, and as Cleveland proved in Tuesday’s heavyweight clash, he’s still very vulnerable defensively. But these are flaws the Celtics can live with. Pritchard is in the game to score, and he’s scoring remarkably well thus far this season.
So is Hield, who functions pretty similarly as a bench weapon that isn’t asked to do much else. Pritchard has the edge simply because he’s asked to create more of his own looks on his own, but Hield has more or less taken on Klay Thompson‘s burden as Golden State’s spare Splash Brother and has shot better thus far this season than Thompson ever did post-injuries. Golden State’s pass-heavy motion offense relies on having a movement shooter with a ton of gravity on the court at all times. Hield can’t do the things Stephen Curry does with the ball, but his presence off of the ball is what makes Golden State’s bench work. For years, the only way to beat the Warriors was to beat their bench. This season? That bench has been so good that Steve Kerr hasn’t even needed to play Curry 30 minutes per game.
Coach of the Year
- Kenny Atkinson
- Steve Kerr
- Joe Mazzulla
The Coach of the Year race usually pits a few top seeds against a coach or two leading up-and-comers that have overperformed. Such a candidate may yet emerge in this race—with Ime Udoka lurking as the likeliest—but for now, the best candidates here are the ones leading the three best teams in the NBA today.
Measuring Atkinson’s impact on the Cavaliers is pretty straightforward. They never won more than 51 games under J.B. Bickerstaff. While they’re not likely to win 16 out of every 17 the rest of the way, Atkinson has them well on their way to a 60-win season. His revamp of the offense featuring more 3-point shooting and more Evan Mobley ball-handling has taken an otherwise bland scheme to the No. 1 offensive ranking in basketball thus far.
Kerr is taking his “strength in numbers” mantra to new extremes this season. They’ve used 13 different players for at least 100 minutes thus far, and while there have been some injuries, this is mostly by choice. Kerr spent an entire offseason hearing about how he’d need to trim his rotation down to nine or 10, but instead he’s consistently played 11, 12 or 13. It’s working. Everyone in the Golden State rotation brings something unique to the table, and Kerr has mixed and matched lineups perfectly. When you control the No. 1 seed in a conference with your best player playing 29.2 minutes per game, you’re a Coach of the Year candidate.
Joe Mazzulla is mathing the NBA to death. Through 15 games, the Celtics are taking 15.4 more 3-pointers per game than their opponents. They deliberately dare opponents to fight for 2s near the basket because they trust their shooting to win the day over a full-game sample. Plenty of teams talk a big game when it comes to analytics. The Celtics have embedded the numbers more deeply into their identity than any team in NBA history. Beating them is almost impossible with a shot diet like that. Either they miss most of their open 3s or you lose.
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