Just give Ja Morant the ROTY of the Year award. Just give it to him, it’s not even close right now. But give it to him quick, because any day now Zion Williamson is going to come back and even though he’s at most going to play 50 percent of the season, people are going to want to give him the award no matter what he does. The narrative for Morant winning hasn’t yet been completely solidified; the national media needs to solidify it. Much like how they solidified Giannis as the MVP last year and no one (including James Harden) could do anything to stop him from winning.
I’m ignoring Kendrick Nunn for the purposes of this discussion. He’s more of a rookie than Ben Simmons, but less of a rookie than Morant. And it’s easy to get some points on a team as well-constructed as the Heat; Morant has to struggle with relative incompetency at every turn.
Morant gave his candidacy a little boost tonight by attempting to take over the game late in the fourth quarter and ending up with 23 points. It was too late to win unless something really crazy happened (but it’s the Kings, so who knows), but he did manage three buckets in the span of 13 game seconds right at the end. In real life it probably took an hour for those buckets to happen, but if you just look at the play-by-play data it really looks quite McGrady-esque.