Andrew Wiggins should not win the Rookie of the Year award
By Ben Beecken
A lot of NBA fans and probably an even higher percentage of Wolves fans think that Andrew Wiggins deserves to win the Rookie of the Year award, most if not all of my colleagues here at Dunking With Wolves included.
Pretty much everyone thinks he will win the award, and that group includes yours truly. The folks voting on this award aren’t looking at rate-based statistics or actual, tangible production, but the overall volume of production. And Wiggins has played the second-most minutes of any player in the entire league, behind only James Harden, so the potential for volume is pretty significant.
Why Andrew Wiggins will win Rookie of the Year
Wiggins will win the award. He’s averaging 16.7 points per game and has given the perception of playing outstanding defense. After all, plays like this make all the highlight shows.
Wiggins has improved month-over-month, for the most part. Check out those fun per-game numbers:
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Except for a brief dip in February when Wiggins understandably hit something resembling a “rookie wall”, he clearly improved throughout the season. That’s important to voters and shows that he developed over the course of his rookie year.
The case isn’t crazy. Look at the only viable competitors, Nikola Mirotic of the Chicago Bulls and Nerlens Noel of the Philadelphia 76ers. Mirotic is only averaging 10 points and 5 rebounds per game, and he’s a six-foot-ten power forward. Noel is putting up just 9.9 points and 8.1 rebounds per game.
Neither player was seeing much of the court early in the season. Both have improved, but Noel plays on a team that is equally as bad as the Wolves and Mirotic has come off the bench for every game but three this season.
Why Andrew Wiggins should not win Rookie of the Year
There is no question that Wiggins has improved offensively. I even wrote about his sizable increase in efficiency compared to what he was providing back in the fall.
But overall, the relative lack of “other things” that Wiggins has provided hurts his overall impact on games. His rebounding rate is just 7.1%, and he’s played small forward for 55% of his minutes thus far, according to Basketball-Reference. His assist rate of 9.1% needs to improve as well, and his respective steal and block rates of 1.5% and 1.3% are good but not notable.
Scoring-wise, Wiggins has become more efficient as noted in the above link. His 31.7 three-point percentage should be better, but isn’t terrible considering he shot just 34.1% from beyond the college arc last season at the University of Kansas.
And while he’s improved his efficiency, he still takes far too many difficult shots. It’s been a pleasant surprise to see a 20 year-old rookie that is so willing to drive into the lane and take contact, but there are still a handful of shot attempts a game that are twisting, contested jump shots outside the paint. There’s no reason for that, and it saps the efficiency from an otherwise decent offensive game.
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Defensively, Wiggins has been asked to guard the league’s best wing players throughout the season, and seems to have done quite well. Overall, he has done what he’s been asked, and he’s playing as one-fifth of a horrid defensive unit. His reputation, as stated above, is that of an above-average defender.
The numbers, however, do not bear that out. ESPN’s Real Plus-Minus slots Wiggins at 412th out of 470 NBA players, with a -2.14 DRPM. I could cherry-pick any number of bad players with a better DRPM, but let’s just say that the Wolves’ own Chase Budinger is one of those players ahead of the prized rookie.
No, I’m not saying that Wiggins is a worse defender than Budinger or Luke Ridnour or Nick Young or Nate Robinson. (Yes, those players were all ranked ahead of Wiggins.) But multiple measures work together to paint a less-than-flattering picture of Wiggins’ actual defensive ability as a rookie in the NBA; Basketball-Reference.com’s Defensive Box Plus/Minus stat puts Wiggins at a -1.8 for the season.
Who should win Rookie of the Year?
My vote would be for Chicago’s Nikola Mirotic. Noel is still too limited offensively and Wiggins has been too inefficient for them to earn my votes.
It’s a bit unfair, considering that the 24 year-old Mirotic has been an outstanding professional player overseas for awhile now, but the award doesn’t discriminate based on age. His Win Shares per 48 minutes (.158 vs. .033), True Shooting Percentage (55.3% vs. 51.5%), and even free throw rate (.465 vs. .395) are all easily superior to Wiggins’.
Those numbers mean more than simple points per game or other opportunity-based statistics. They account for efficiency and effectiveness in other areas of the game than points scored. And for the crowd that cares about team performance, well, he plays on a team that could be about to lock down a top-four seed in the Eastern Conference.
Wiggins will win the award and I’ll be happy about that; I’m a Timberwolves fan, after all. But that doesn’t mean that he deserves it, and I think it’s important to recognize just how good of an NBA player Nikola Mirotic is already and how good he could become.
While both Mirotic and Wiggins have extremely bright futures, Wiggins’ certainly has a higher ceiling. But that isn’t what this award is about.
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- In an OT thriller, Team Canada snatches Bronze from Team USA
- Timberwolves start, bench, cut: Mike Conley, Shake Milton, Jordan McLaughlin
- Which Timberwolves roster additions have upgraded the bench?