Dennis Smith Jr. can still win ROTY of the year. Don’t give up hope, Smithsonians Jr.! I’ve been doing some research on past winners and what the voters want to see in a candidate, and I’ve figured out what he needs to do win:
– One word: statpadding. I think every prior ROTY winner was a statpadder, except for Malcolm Brogdon and Mike miller. This ties in with a lot of my other points.
– More scoring. This goes along with “statpadding”, but he needs to go out there and score 20 basically every game from here on out, preferably with a bunch of 30-point efforts and maybe a 60-burger to round things out. A rookie scoring 60 could not be ignored by the award voters.
– Tell Mark Cuban to stop blatantly tanking. A few more wins would look great on that ROTY resume.
– Kill Ben Simmons. Simmons has the stats advantage, he has the wins advantage, he has the narrative advantage, if there’s an advantage to be had, Simmons has it over Smith Jr. To avoid the most serious criminal charges, I would advise he hire a hitman instead of doing the deed himself.
– Kill Donovan Mitchell. This one is maybe not as important as the one above, but just to make sure I would incinerate Mitchell with a flamethrower then dump his carbonized body into pre-dug grave somewhere in the middle of rural Texas.
– Bribe the voters. The voters like to pretend to have objectivity, but he’s a frickin’ NBA player with tons of money, you think they won’t say no to a couple million smackers apiece? Everything has a price, but he might have to take out some serious loans to fund this operation. That’s okay. He’s an NBA player, he’s got tons of future earnings that will make the banks swoon.
So there we go. If he follows this 6-step plan, he’ll have a nice piece of hardware that will look super slick next to his numerous future championship rings.