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Also read: 5 Best NBA Rookies of all-time
In what has been the most engaging Rookie of the Year race in recent memory, this regular season campaign, we have seen the arrival of 3 players who are surefire studs in the near future. All 3 of them have a genuine case to be the winners this year, and unlike 2013 when none of Michael Carter-Williams, Trey Burke, and Victor Oladipo was seen as an impactful player for that season, these 3 players could give many All-Stars a genuine run for their money.
Jayson Tatum, Donovan Mitchell, and Ben Simmons are all playing exceptionally good basketball this year, and have had starring roles for their teams nearly all season long. In this article, we attempt to make lay out a detailed case for all 3 of these rookies, following up with a prediction of the polling results and our verdict on who we think deserves the award.
We start our analysis with Jayson Tatum, for whom we have the following 3 arguments:
#1 Tatum is the most polished offensive rookie
Tatum belongs to the rare breed of players who are elite from every point on the hardwood. He has great foot speed, amazing athleticism and agility, tight handles and can make all those highlight reel plays. But he's also great from mid-range, scoring a bunch of points from the 10-18 foot range on pretty good conversion rates.
His best ability, and really the clincher here, is his ability to consistently nail 3-pointers. Tatum led the league in 3-point percentage for much of the season and is still ranked 8th with a conversion rate of 43.4% from downtown.
The best bit about Tatum on offense is the fact that he rarely, if ever, makes the wrong basketball play. He has a level head, and even on days when he's really feeling it, he doesn't go chucking shots, unlike some players we've seen in the past like JR Smith or Dion Waiters.
Nearly always, he opts for the highest-percentage play, and he always plays within the team's offensive system. Such level-headedness is exceedingly rare among even veterans.
#2 Tatum is the best rookie on possibly the best team in the Eastern Conference
The Boston Celtics have taken the league by storm - there's no other way to say it.
With a 53-23 record so far and the #2 seed in the Eastern Conference locked up - with a chance to catch the #1 Toronto Raptors if results go their way, and the 16-game winning streak they put together at the start of the season, the Celtics have emerged as the most dangerous threat to end the Cavaliers' streak of NBA Finals appearances at 3.
On Tatum's part, he's been the only ever-present in a roster that has been affected by a spate of ill health, injury troubles and constant niggles to everyone else. He's played the most minutes in the roster, and it doesn't seem like Gordon Hayward has been missed all that much by the Boston Celtics mostly because of how well Tatum has meshed into his starting berth this season.
The fact that the Celtics are not missing a bonafide All-Star due to a rookie who's replaced him in the lineup should, by and of itself, be a substantial argument in Tatum's Rookie of the Year case.
#3 Tatum is statistically the best two-way rookie we've seen in quite some time
Jarrett Allen is probably the best shotblocker among rookies this season. Ben Simmons has the highest number of steals. Lonzo Ball is probably the best all-around defender. Donovan Mitchell is the scoring leader. Simmons and Ball are both elite assist men who are point guards. And yet, Tatum is the only rookie to figure in the top 16 among all these categories - he's definitely up there with Lonzo among the best defenders in this rookie class.
His defensive numbers bear out this notion. Tatum has the third-best defensive rating among rookies playing 15 or more minutes per game this season at 100.4 points conceded per 100 possessions. He ranks first among qualified rookies in defensive win shares per 36 minutes and also ranks 2nd in total defensive win shares this season with 4.0 so far.
The eye test says the same thing. We've seen Tatum guard 6'11" Simmons, but we've also seen him take up Chris Paul and James Harden on switches at various points in the Rockets-Celtics matchups. This dude has the ability to guard up to 4 positions on the floor, what with his 7-foot wingspan and impressive foot speed.
Tatum has the genuine ability to impact the game in every possible way that does or does not count among the major statistical categories. The importance of this special skill level cannot be emphasized enough. Tatum could easily emerge as the next great two-way swingman to take the league by storm like Paul George, Jimmy Butler, and teammate Gordon Hayward have in this decade of NBA basketball.
Note: We take a look at 3 arguments for Ben Simmons as Rookie of the Year from the next slide onwards
#1 Simmons has historically great box score statistics
Ben Simmons is a monster, all things considered. The last time a player averaged 16 points (rounded off to the nearest whole number), 8 assists and 8 rebounds in his rookie season was back in 1960-61 when Oscar Robertson posted averages of 30.5 points, 10.1 rebounds and 9.7 assists. Magic Johnson posted averages of 18.0 points, 7.7 rebounds and 7.3 assists, and he is the only true comparison Simmons has in terms of physicality and skills.
What's so puzzling about this is the fact that he's putting up these averages without ever attempting a 3-pointer, or even jump shots from 16 feet or so. Opponents have tried to strategize around this apparent weakness in his game, but nobody has quite found a way to make him any less effective than he generally is. More than anything, it speaks to his basketball IQ that he finds a way to guide the 76ers to the 13th-ranked offense in the league.
While we're at it, it might be worth mentioning that Simmons is by the most unselfish player in the league by a fairly wide margin. While iso machines like James Harden, Damian Lillard, and LeBron James generally use their passes as weapons only to rack up assists, Simmons keeps the ball moving around with his league-leading 74.4 passes per game (Lonzo Ball is a distant second with 65.4). With Simmons, the assists come as a result of volume.
#2 Simmons is a nightmare matchup
Simmons is the biggest playmaker in this league. While Giannis is a comparable size, for over half of the Bucks' game time it is Bledsoe or Brogdon running the point guard position. Simmons plays as a point guard for the entire duration that he takes the floor, and this is really bad news for whoever is his primary defender.
Simmons has deceptively good ball-handling skills. He's also 6'11", meaning that most of the time, he can take his primary defender (who's usually smaller than him) to the post region and make plays.
If opponents strategize to place a smaller, faster player on him, Simmons could either use a pick to get past his primary defender or draw double teams by driving into the paint using his physicality and then kick it out to an open teammate. If they place a defender with comparable physicality on him, most of the time Simmons will find the mismatch and feed the ball there for his teammate to exploit this difference in size in isolation play.
It's nearly always a case of picking a particular poison for opposition defenses.
#3 Simmons is an elite defender who can cause chaos
The 'Young King', unlike The King these days in the regular season, does not stand on the weak side to snag easy rebounds and inflate his stats. To the contrary, Simmons is one of the hardest-working players on the defensive end. All defensive metrics bear out this notion.
His total of 4.2 defensive win shares this season ranks a fantastic #2 in the league, and his defensive rating of 101.3 is second only to Tatum among rookies playing more than 12 minutes per game.
The eye test bears out this notion as well. Simmons has exceptionally quick hands and can be a real thief on his night. He can guard multiple positions, even centers at times. He has the ability to convert turnovers or missed shots into transition opportunities and is an exceptionally good help defender as well.
Note: We take a look at 3 arguments for Donovan Mitchell as Rookie of the Year from the next slide onwards
#1 Donovan Mitchell is one of the best scorers in the game already
One of the best things about Mitchell's game is the fact that defenses are already finding it pretty hard to clamp down on him. Combining a fluid shooting stroke with a couple of nice ballhandling moves, Mitchell is a threat to outrun most defenders into the paint if they aren't careful with their foot movement.
What's more, Mitchell is also a threat from downtown, as well as mid-range. Albeit not as fluid and smooth as Tatum, he can nevertheless pretty much create his own shot from most spots on the floor.
The closest NBA comparison for Mitchell's combination of speed and shooting ability is Damian Lillard, although the Spider still has a ways to go before he can be as much of an isolation threat as Lillard is on a nightly basis.
All said and done, Mitchell is the leading per-game scorer among all rookies by the fairly wide margin of 4.3 points over his next best competitor - the Los Angeles Lakers' Kyle Kuzma. In fact, he's so good that he's ranked 21st league-wide in points per game, which basically means that he's capable of being a franchise player by next year (assuming he improves his game in the offseason).
#2 He's shouldering a bigger load than every other rookie
How many other rookies became the primary scoring option for their teams within their first few weeks in the league? On a historical basis, you could perhaps argue that there are many. But over the course of this century, the only ones who spring to mind are LeBron James, Kevin Durant, Blake Griffin, Kyrie Irving and Damian Lillard.
You know what's the common factor among all these players? It doesn't take much time to figure out that all the aforementioned players were runaway Rookie of the Year winners in their respective rookie seasons.
The Utah Jazz has missed the volume scoring of Gordon Hayward, who signed with the Boston Celtics in the offseason. While they do have a working wing rotation to play a league-average offense, they don't have any featured scorer whom they can trust during clutch time.If Rudy Gobert is the Jazz's defensive anchor, Donovan Mitchell is the offensive lifeline who has led the Jazz to an eminently respectable 44-33 record.
#3 He has been consistent throughout the season
If you look at Donovan Mitchell's competition among rookies, you'll find that many of them had an up-and-down season, even if in Ben Simmons' case it was more of a team problem than individually. The likes of Josh Jackson and De'Aaron Fox have had good second halves of the season, while Simmons is playing way better after being snubbed from the All-Star Game festivities than he was before.
If it weren't for a 7-game substitute appearance streak in the month of October, the rookie would have even better scoring statistics for the season. Indeed, since November, Mitchell has never scored below 20 points per game for a single month. He is averaging 22.5 points per game from December onwards. He has 7 games with 30 or more points in this time period and has only scored in single digits thrice.
Combined with the net defensive value Mitchell adds to the team (he's ranked #9 in the league in defensive win shares per game), his energy levels and the scoring bursts that he powers the team with every once in a while, he is a momentum-changer the like of which we are yet to see in this rookie class.
Verdict
In the iconic Uncle Drew commercials, we heard Kyrie Irving dish out some sage advice to the young bloods whom he beats on the court: "Basketball isn't a game, it's an art. You master the fundamentals so you can forget 'em, so you can improvise and focus on what's most imporant: GETTING BUCKETS."
We at Sportskeeda are subscribers to this philosophy as well, which is why we give the nod to Donovan Mitchell (by a wafer-thin margin, I might add) as our pick for Rookie of the Year. There is nothing more irreplaceable in the game of basketball than the ability of a certain player to just score a bunch of points in a short span of time, particularly in clutch situations.
Mitchell shades it based on his scoring prowess, and also because of the fact that the Jazz managed to just about stay afloat largely due to his efforts during the time missed by Rudy Gobert from early December to late January.
It is very probable that none of the other two rookies could've provided to the Jazz the scoring punch they needed from Mitchell in this timespan - his most impressive games were against the Pelicans and the Cavaliers in December when it seemed like he'd single-handedly won them the game.
Guess the Lakers players!
