I don’t see how it’s fair to other rookies that Luka Doncic gets to win ROY of the Year even though he already won a frickin’ MVP award in the second best basketball league in the world. Shouldn’t that, like, disqualify him from being a rookie? The word “rookie” implies a sort of rawness, or inexperience. It implies that the holder of the designation is playing against fully grown adults for the first time. And the award aims to reward those who do best under those adverse circumstances.
Doncic has already been kicking man-ass for a while now, while Deandre Ayton and company have been kicking the ass of prepubescent children in the NCAA. Doncic coming into the NBA and kicking more ass is something that we all expected.
What I’m saying is, it’s not fair that Doncic got to get tons of valuable experience before coming to the NBA while the experience everyone else got in the NCAA was near-worthless, and that he gets to use that experience to win some hardware. At the very least, there should be a separate award for “real” rookies, not rookies who got to miss a year before playing (Ben Simmons), or Euro rookies (Doncic and Rodions Kurucs), or older college players who redshirted a year (Malcolm Brogdon). An award for real rookies who are really 19 years old and really suck.