Are Gibson and Brooks Sixth Man of the Year candidates?
By Nick Jordan
The NBA’s Sixth Man of the Year race is deeper and more intriguing than it has been in a long time. The league’s sheer volume of good teams and the Popovichian movement towards the value of bench players has led to a mass of people with real arguments to be made for Sixth Man of the Year.
I tried to narrow down the field and rank the top five candidates. To be a contender, a player has to be considered a bench player when the team is fully healthy, plays at least 20 minutes per game and is on a team that at least has a chance to make the playoffs.
Nine names came up.
Ryan Anderson, Aaron Brooks, Jamal Crawford, Taj Gibson, Lou Williams, Isaiah Thomas, Gerald Green, Manu Ginobili, and Patrick Patterson.
Interestingly, six of the nine players are a teammate of another player. Most of the time, the Sixth Man of the Year is good enough to play during crunch time of close games, so to be in contention a player has to have played at least 30 minutes of crunch time. This eliminates Gibson. I know it doesn’t make a lot of sense given that he would probably get crunch time minutes for any of the other teams, but the field is just too deep.
Next I got rid of Anderson because he is in the league as a stretch 4 that can shoot 3s, yet his 3-point shooting (34.7 percent) is worse than five of the remaining players. Also, it is still up in the air whether he should get crunch time minutes over Omer Asik, or if he can play with both Asik and Anthony Davis at the same time.
I then crossed off Patterson and Green because it does seem a little ridiculous to have two Sixth Man of the Year candidates on the same team. The only reason Patterson made it that high despite averaging just 8.7 points and 5.5 rebounds per game is because he is the darling of advanced stats. He leads all nine players in win shares at 4.1 and has a true shooting percentage at 60.6 percent. I was going to try to make an argument for why he was actually the Raptors most important bench player and not Lou Williams, but then I realized that Toronto is looking to trade for a power forward at the deadline because they don’t think Patterson is good enough.
Now, in order, the five top candidates to win Sixth Man of the Year.
Next: Aaron Brooks