Boston Celtics coach Brad Stevens ended up in 8th place for the NBA’s Coach of the Year award voting. Nick Nurse was named COY for the first time in his professional career.
Just one year (and a few months give or take) after winning the NBA Championship in his first professional season as an NBA head coach, Nick Nurse has won his first Coach of the Year award. While that news is unfortunate, the more unfortunate news is where Boston Celtics head coach Brad Stevens ended up in the voting:
Tied for 8th place? Whether or not you are a C’s fan, you should give more credit to a coach that lost his two best players in free agency and was still able to field a top-five team on offense, defense, and in the standings.
I digress…begrudgingly…
Either way, the voting revealed a lot about what the media thought of this past season. Here are 3 observations from the COY award voting results:
1. Losing Kawhi and D. Green means more to voters than losing Kyrie, Al
No knock on Nick Nurse. He has done an incredible job since coming into the head coaching role for the Raptors. He elevated a team that couldn’t get over the hump in the Eastern Conference and knocked off a perennial powerhouse Golden State team in the NBA Finals. That he was able to end up with a higher winning percentage after losing Kawhi Leonard and Danny Green is an incredible feat.
But Brad Stevens lost two All-Stars in Kyrie Irving and Al Horford, another starter in Marcus Morris and a budding floor general in Terry Rozier and replaced them with mostly internal options and the free-agent signings of Kemba Walker and Enes Kanter. He finished behind Frank Vogel–who has two of the league’s top five players, Erik Spoelstra–who finished behind him in the standings, and Taylor Jenkins–who didn’t even make the postseason, losing in the play-in game!
Nurse ended up with just five more wins this season but is clearly held in much higher regard than Stevens. The Boston Celtics coach will have a chance to prove his merits in a likely second round matchup against Toronto in a head to head clash with the reigning Coach of the Year.
2. Voter fatigue hurt Mike Budenholzer and the Milwaukee Bucks
Truthfully, the Milwaukee Bucks were on their way to a historic season before the NBA’s season was suspended in March. Milwaukee has not shown up so far in the bubble, going 5-7 (including the playoffs) since entering the Lake Buena Vista bubble in Walt Disney World.
That recent stretch undoubtedly hurt them, but the fact that they won 60 games last year en route to a Coach of the Year award definitely didn’t do head coach Mike Budenholzer any favors in voting this season.
3. Oklahoma City has been a noticed story this season
While they haven’t been impressive in the playoffs so far, what the Oklahoma City Thunder have been able to accomplish in 2019-20 has not gone unnoticed by the national media. Having a former championship college head coach in Billy Donovan and one of the league’s biggest stars in Chris Paul helps, but the results have been astounding.
Initially given a two percent chance of making the playoffs, OKC finished a game and a half back of the #3 seed in the West. When a rebuilding team is able to shock the world to this degree, and every player on the team has seemingly embraced the role they need to play to win, their story is one worth honoring…and thankfully the COY voting did just that.