Jazz Awards, Volume 1: Utah’s 2022-23 MVP, DPOY, MIP

Markkanen’s leap to All-Star level might earn him some hardware on Monday night. (Trent Nelson, The Salt Lake Tribune)

The NBA’s awards season is both glorious and terrible. It spurs so much interesting debate that informs the myriad different ways to define basketball value, and at the same time it’s fueled by bad-faith arguments and comically oversimplified takes. This year’s 3-man MVP debate was particularly lowbrow at various moments, but even down-ballot races caused entire fanbases to collective lost their minds. Oh no, Paolo Banchero is winning the Rookie of the Year straw poll 27-to-1 instead of 28-0?! Let’s riot!

This year, the league generated even more talk radio-style debate by naming each major award after a past NBA great. Who deserves to have their name on the Clutch Player of the Award? Are 4-time DPOY winners Dikembe Mutombo or Ben Wallace more deserving of the trophy naming honors than Hakeem Olajuwon, who won it twice? What exactly is the logic to put the name of George Mikan, who led the league in scoring AND won a title in each of his first two seasons, on the Most Improved Player trophy?

Debate away, basketball world. It’s awesome. Also, it sucks.

The chatter around the trophy naming process made me wonder: if we were to launch Jazz-specific awards and have them bear the name of past franchise figures, what would that look like? It actually becomes a fun way to process Jazz history. Which past defensive great should be the benchmark for elite performance on that end? If there can be only one name on the Jazz’s own version of an MVP trophy — and another on a postseason MVP trophy — who should that be? The club has only had one winner for each of the ROY, 6MOY and (soon) MIP awards, but are those the right names to attach to the honors into perpetuity?

This will hopefully spark some fun historical debate, but to connect it to the present, let’s also then award each fake trophy to one of the 2022-23 Jazz players. To be clear, this isn’t a the same as saying that a Jazz player should be the league’s MVP, DPOY, etc.; rather, it’s a a way to award the best performances within the team for the just-concluded campaign.

A few rules going in:

• No one Jazz player/figure can be the namesake for more than one award.
• Generally speaking, we should recognize guys who actually won the award in question. (Although spoiler alert: I’m going to break this rule in a couple of cases.)
• The NBA decided not to name any awards after players who are still active. I did not impose that same rule on this exercise.
• With all due respect to the David Robinson Community Assist Award or the Twyman-Stokes Teammate of the Year, I’m focusing on individual awards for on-court stuff.

So let’s name — and then give out — 10 fake Jazz awards!

It takes a lot of words to name 10 trophies and then give them out to 2022-23 Jazz recipients, so we’ll do this over the course of a few days:

• Today: MVP, DPOY and MIP
• Tomorrow: ROY, Clutch, 6MOY, Postseason MVP
• Wednesday: Comeback player, COY, EOY

So let’s get going with some fake hardware.

The Karl Malone Most Valuable Jazz Player Trophy

Let’s start with the most obvious one. In addition to being the franchise leader in minutes, points, rebounds and win shares, the Mailman is also the only player ever to win the actual MVP award while a Jazzman (and he did it twice). He was a 14-time All-Star and 14-time All-NBA selection, and the top 10 PER seasons in club history all belong to him.

Obviously it would be better if he didn’t have a tricky past, to put it super nicely. That’s a complicated set of issues to just conveniently untangle from his on-court accomplishments. Ultimately, the second choice is someone who himself is involved in some pretty controversial stuff in the present day. The real MVP award is named for someone who had a well-documented gambling problem. How much do the mistakes of flawed people tarnish their very real accomplishments and legacies? Are some mistakes are so unforgivable that even four decades later they disqualify an individual from professional respect? Those are legitimately hard questions.

Maybe someday another Jazz star will surpass him and we can get a break from dealing with the awkwardness of having his complicated history linked so inextricably to the franchise as a whole.

In the meantime, here’s what I know: nobody has added basketball value to the Jazz franchise quite as much as Malone.

2022-23 Winner: Lauri Markkanen

A similarly easy call here. Markkanen became the Jazz’s central figure on offense, and was in the top 20ish in the entire league in RPM (17th), EPM (21st), RAPTOR WAR (21st), true shooting (21st), win shares (20th) and more.

There’s an anecdote that has been shared by several of the beat writers where the Jazz were reviewing film in the first couple months of the season. While they went over plays from a recent game, coach Will Hardy suddenly stopped in his tracks. He turned to the team and said something to the effect of: Guys, Lauri is our best player. Nobody could argue.

We don’t know precisely when that realization was reached, but we heard about it in December. Sometime right around then is when the Finnish national team’s star began playing like the Jazz’s No. 1 option. He had been solidly good early on, even with some 30-point games interspersed throughout his first two months. But starting right around Christmas, he seemed to take that epiphany seriously. From December 20 on, he averaged 28 and 9, with nearly 30% usage and 63% true shooting.

He posted the team’s best net rating: +3.8 per 100 possessions, and in total the Jazz outscored teams by 163 points in Markkanen’s nearly 2,300 minutes, then lost by 240 in the other ~1,700.

He made an All-Star team in his first Jazz season, and he might be named to an All-NBA team as well. He was easily the Jazz’s best player and made giving out this first fake award easy work.

The Rudy Gobert Defensive Jazz Player of the Year Trophy

Gobert won the DPOY award three times and Mark Eaton won it twice. You could make the case for Eaton here, but it would be based almost entirely on blocked shots. Eaton holds several unbreakable Jazz block records, starting with the fact that he swatted more than twice as many shots in his 11-year Jazz career as Gobert did in nine Utah seasons.

But defense is more than blocking shots, and Gobert’s role in the more modern defensive landscape is more varied and impressive. Eaton lived at the rim. In Gobert’s era, that wasn’t an option. Yes, he was the physical epicenter of the Jazz’s defensive universe for the last version of the Jazz, but in the modern game that couldn’t ever just mean standing in front of the rim with his arms stretched out. A sumo wrestler sitting in a hockey goal would probably be harder for opponents to score goals in, but is that the same thing as being a great goalie? I mean, maybe. That’s an oversimplification of what Eaton was, but the primary bullet on his defensive job description in the 1980s was “be 7’4″ and lurk around the rim.”

Gobert did most of the other stuff better. He grabbed more total rebounds as a Jazzman than Eaton despite playing in 30% fewer games. At his peak he could guard both guys in the pick-and-roll better than almost anybody in league history, which enabled the Jazz to guard ball screens 2-on-2 and not compromise the defense elsewhere. “Switching” wasn’t really a concept in the ’80s because the NBA wasn’t yet a pick-and-roll-every-possession kind of league, but can you imagine Eaton switching out to guard Isiah Thomas or Clyde Drexler in space? Gobert frequently did pick up guards. Occasionally it ended with him spinning into the Milky Way in clever GIFs, but on the aggregate his defensive outcomes in space were elite for a big.

Gobert made all-defense six times as a Jazzman, Eaton five times. In the end, I went Gobert.

2022-23 Winner: Walker Kessler

Since people are still whining over a single vote cast for Kessler in the ROY race, they’ll freak out at this hot take: the rookie big probably should have gotten some DPOY votes.

Jazz opponents shot 8.4% worse at the rim when Kessler was on the court. The only player with a bigger positive difference than that in at least 1,000 minutes was actual DPOY winner Jaren Jackson Jr. Overall, Jazz opponents had a 4.1% lower eFG% with Kessler on the floor. He had the most blocks by a rookie since 1997-98, and the fourth most of all players this season.

He was the Jazz’s best defender by a wide margin, which is a truly impressive sentence about a rookie.

The Lauri Markkanen Most Improved Jazz Player Trophy

The Jazz have never had an MIP winner, but that will likely only be true until this evening. The NBA is set to announce that particular award before Monday’s playoff games, and it’s widely expected they’ll make Markkanen’s honor official.

This easily could have gone to Gobert, whose career climb from G Leaguer to starter to defensive force to 4-time All-NBA player is remarkable. Mitchell also got better year-to-year almost throughout his Jazz career, and it would be fun to recognize that steady climb. (His fourth-to-fifth season stats are pretty flat.) Andrei Kirilenko made a big jump in his All-Star season and finished fourth in 2003-04 MIP voting. Several Finals-era players went from being discreet role players to major pieces. Stockton led the league in assists and nearly doubled his scoring in year four after coming off the bench for three seasons. He was second in MIP voting that year.

But ultimately, I figure why overcomplicate things? Markkanen’s expected win gives us permission to make this simple and name this after the only Jazz player since Adrian Dantley (’79-80) and one of just six NBA players in the 3-point era to clear the 25 ppg mark for the first time by making a double digit leap.

2022-23 Winner: Duh

Markkanen’s MIP case (the real award, not this fake one) is fairly obvious when you look at his year-to-year jump: he went from 14.8 and 5.7 on average-ish true shooting (.582) to 25.6 and 8.6 as one of the most efficient volume scorers in the NBA (.640).

But what’s even more impressive is that he kept getting better as the season went along. His scoring went from 22.3 ppg over the first 30 games to 28.4 in the next 36. He rebounded more (8.3 to 8.9) and used possessions like a star (23.6% to 29.2%) while maintaining true shooting figures in the mid-60s. 

On the macro, he went from being the 4th or 5th best starter on a middling team to being an All-Star (with a chance of making All-NBA). That’s a huge qualitative leap, combined with the huge quantitative one.

We’ll name and deliver more fake trophies tomorrow as we continue to honor the best Jazz performances of 2022-23 with a nod to superlative figures from the franchise’s past.