We’re halfway through the NBA season now, and we’re starting to narrow down the potential winners of the league’s annual awards to just a handful of candidates. The Rookie of the Year and Defensive Player of the Year awards are clinched, with Most Improved and MVP still in close races. But perhaps the closest race of all is the three-man sprint for Coach of the Year.
Here are the candidates:
Who will win the NBA Coach of the Year award?
joe mazulla
Mazzulla is in his rookie year as the head coach of an NBA team, and is currently the clubhouse leader at +195 to win the Coach of the Year award. He has been on the Celtics’ staff since 2019 as an assistant coach, but was promoted to manager after Ime Udoka’s suspension.
It can be argued that Mazzulla inherited the team’s mentality and style of play from his predecessor, but there’s no denying how successful he’s been this year. The Celtics are 41-16, the best in the NBA, and have led the Eastern Conference for most of the year. If they finish with the highest record and make it to the playoffs, there won’t be much reason to give the award to anyone else.
mike brown
Anyone who leads the Sacramento Kings into playoff contention after a 16-year drought deserves Coach of the Year consideration. Mike Brown has done that, and then some.
The longtime laughingstock of the league, the Kings currently sit in third place in the highly competitive Western Conference, behind only the Nuggets and Grizzlies. They have the best offense in the league, averaging 119.6 points per game, and while the defense isn’t that great, they’ve made drastic improvements on that end to help them get to the position they’re in.
Chalk a lot of that down to Brown and the implementation of his system, which has the Kings in a place they haven’t been in nearly two decades. Your odds of winning the prize are currently +200.
michael malone
The only one of the three candidates in the race not in his first year with his current team is Michael Malone. He has been the head coach of the Nuggets since 2015 and has been a big reason for their rise to the top of the league in the last 8 years. This may be his best work yet, as he has Denver atop the Western Conference with a 39-18 record. They hold a 4.5 game lead over the second-place Grizzlies, an astronomical difference given how tight the rest of the conference is.
Having the top MVP candidate on your team helps. It also helps when that guy is a center averaging a triple-double. But any coach who has his team in first place in a conference bloodbath should be considered Coach of the Year, and Malone is on the outside looking in, sitting at +425.
Grizzlies head coach Taylor Jenkins is the next coach on the list, at a very distant +1000.
