After much speculation surrounding the regular season awards, the official winners are slowly starting to trickle in day by day. First, Toronto Raptors guard Lou Williams took home Sixth Man of the Year — Andre Iguodala finished in sixth place.
Next, Atlanta Hawks head coach Mike Budenholzer won the Coach of the Year award over Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr, who finished in second.
The next major regular season award winner was announced on Thursday, and to the surprise of #DubNation, Draymond Green was not the winner. Instead, San Antonio Spurs forward, and last years NBA Finals MVP, Kawhi Leonard took home the hardware.
The most shocking aspect of all of this is not that Leonard won over Green. After all, they both had tremendous seasons defensively. The baffling part of this is that Green received eight more first place votes than Leonard but still finished second. In fact, Green received 45 first place votes, but was left off 42 ballots completely.
Apparently the voting wasn’t so easy. Bill Simmons from Grantland, tweeted out his opinion on the award winner: “I voted for Kawhi…best perimeter defender I’ve seen since peak Pippen. But Draymond was amazing. I changed my vote 10 times.”
Arash Markazi, a writer for ESPN, pointed to games missed not being a big factor for Leonard in a tweet he sent out: “I thought Jamal Crawford missing 18 games really hurt him in 6th Man race. It didn’t have much of an effect at all for Kawhi.”
Ethan Strauss from ESPN, who talked to coach Kerr after the results were released, tweeted: “Kerr says the amount of people who left Draymond off the ballot was ‘a little tough to swallow’.”
Diamond Leung of the Bay Area News Group noticed that Tommy Heinsohn, TV broadcaster for the Boston Celtics, left both Kerr off his Coach Of The Year and Green off his Defensive Player Of The Year ballots, prompting the debate of whether or not East Coast voters have watched the Warriors play this season.
“I guess you don’t call it TiVo anymore. DVR,” said Kerr at morning shootaround today, as reported by Leung, “If you’re voting, don’t you make an obligation to watch? I don’t know. I have no idea.”
One #DubNation member @SamuelKiene123 responded to the news by tweeting: “that’s why they need to change this voting style”
Another user, @LoMed1978 tweeted: “lazy voters. That streak the Spurs went on to end the year was what swayed em.”
“To go through the season, watch how we play, see how he’s impacting the game at that end of the floor, for him not be (left off of ballots as) one, two, or three is crazy to me,” said Stephen Curry today at morning shootaround, “but good thing I know about Draymond is, he’s going to bring it every night, regardless.”
“He’s had to fight to establish himself in this league. This isn’t going to deter him at all,” Curry added. “He’ll get one eventually. We obviously all have bigger goals looking forward to playing a long time in the next two months, so that’s the focus and we’ll be ready.”
When Green himself was asked about the results, he did not seem to be too surprised that Leonard won.
“Congratulations to Kawhi. You know, he’s a great defender. Phenomenal defender, you know, he impacts the defensive end just as good as anyone in the league so congragulations to him,” Green said at morning shoot around in New Orleans today. “It’s not the end of the world. Al Gore won the popular vote but didn’t get elected president so I’m not going to sit here and kill myself over not winning Defensive Player of the Year.
“We got bigger goals. That’s to win a championship. Kawhi is what we all try to be. He’s a champion so you can’t sit here and beat yourself up or worry about what happened.”
When asked if he was disappointed Green had a quick response.
“Disappointed? Yes. To be angry, you can’t be angry, that man is a champion.”
[NOTE: Poor Man’s Commish contributed to this report.]Add The Sports Daily to your Google News Feed!
