2019-20 Mid-Season Awards
The Deal
We don't have to wait for the season to finish in order to hand out awards. Here's a few a zany ones to commemorate the season through February.
Blake Griffin Memorial Award
This award goes to the poor hooper who, despite being an All-Star level talent, gets dealt from a good squad to a meddling team in an underwhelming market, but doesn’t despair and still balls out.
Winner: Chris Paul
Paul’s lot is considerably better than Blake’s in Detroit. OKC will actually make it into the playoffs and likely steal a game or two in the first round. Unlike Detroit, though, OKC’s plan forward seems pretty clear--and it’s not built around CP.
Quarter-Life Crisis Award
This one’s for the dude who made a semi-dramatic life choice under the pressure of career or team turmoil.
Winner: Kyle Kuzma
While the Lakers haven’t been an overly dramatic club given their history and LeBron’s penchant to thrive off of turmoil, the season has been an anxious one for one player. Though he’s uber-versatile, Bron’s clearly a 4. And though Anthony Davis is clearly a perfect-modern 5, he insists on playing as a 4. Playing alongside Bron and AD is a dream scenario, unless you play the same position as them, which is the exact scenario that Kuz finds himself in.
If you’ve ever wondered what a sane man does when he spends one season paranoid that he’s gonna get dispatched for an all-star and then the next season log-jammed between that player and basketball’s second-best athlete, well apparently the move is to bleach one’s hair.
Double-Take Award
Between the nightly highlights of 30-foot Trae Young bombs and Zion detonating at the rim, the NBA gives ya a lot of reasons to question what you just saw. This award is for the most surprising event of the ‘19-’20 season.
Winner: Russell Westbrook
12 years into his career, Russ was one of the most well-known and clearly-defined athletes in the game. A headstrong dynamo, he commanded the ball and believed he could make every shot by purely willing the ball through the hoop. The trouble was, for how breath-taking and talented as he was, he couldn’t. But he insisted on taking challenging shots and taking ‘em often. With KD gone, it seemed Russ was destined to be the king of counting stats and the MVP of House of Highlights’ feed, yet fall short in the playoffs annually.
Then OKC got pragmatic and dealt Russ and his mega-contract to Houston. Okay, fine. Instead of doing his daredevil bit in Oklahoma, he’d be doing it next to James Harden. It was pretty clear that there was one too few basketballs for the league’s most frequent dribblers. And then Houston traded their only big man in Clint Capela.
If you gave me 20 attempts to reason out how Russ would come to improve his shot selection and streamline his entire style of play I wouldn’t have guessed it’d be because he was shoehorned into playing as a nominal big man. But the switch flipped and Russ began giving up low-efficiency 3s and started attacking the rim with greater focus and vintage ferocity and now you could convince me of basically anything.
Harlem Shake Award
When a ball club is really rolling, the team hijinks ensue. Winning has always created chemistry--and goofballery. So when the peak-Heatles were tearing through the NBA, and Bauuer’s Harlem Shake had grown into full-on mega-meme mode, the two naturally intersected in the Heat’s locker room.
Winner: Milwaukee Bucks
Milwaukee is 60+ games into the year with a winning percentage at 85%--the team shenanigans are frequent. If Joel Embiid is the #1 choice for best possible NBA player to make the jump to WWE heel, Robin Lopez is 1A. God bless the guy for the number of times he’s be pseudo-suplexed and faux-clotheslined this season. I would have figured the bit would have died by now since they've been at it all year, but RoLo/Wes/Giannis/Thanasis + Co. seem to still genuinely enjoy it every pre-game. When the playoffs come around, I’m setting the over/under for the number of opponents that RoLo Swanton Bombs at 3.5.