We are well past the halfway point of the NBA season, and we are beginning to narrow down the possible winners of the league’s yearly awards to just a handful of candidates. The Rookie of the Year and Defensive Player of the Year awards have all been locked up, with Most Improved and MVP still in tight races. But perhaps the closest race of them all is the three-man sprint for Coach of the Year.
Here are the candidates:
Who Will Win NBA Coach of the Year?
Joe Mazzulla
Mazzulla is in his rookie year as the head coach of an NBA team, and he is currently the leader in the clubhouse at +195 to win the Coach of the Year award. He has been a part of the Celtics staff since 2019 as an assistant coach, but was promoted to the head job after the suspension to Ime Udoka.
It can be argued that Mazzulla inherited the team’s mentality and style of play from his predecessor, but there is no denying the success that he has had this year. The Celtics are an NBA-best 41-16 and have been the leaders in the Eastern Conference for essentially the entire year. If they finish with the top record and make a run deep into the playoffs, there won’t be much reason to give the award to anyone else.
Mike Brown
Anyone that gets the Sacramento Kings into playoff contention after a 16-year drought deserves consideration for Coach of the Year. Mike Brown has done that, and then some.
The long-time laughingstock of the league, the Kings are currently 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 is nowhere near as good, they have made drastic improvements on that end to help them get to the position they are in.
Attribute plenty of that to Brown and the implementation of his system, which has the Kings in a spot that they haven’t been in in nearly two decades. His odds to win the award currently sit at +200.
Michael Malone
The only one of the three candidates in the running who isn’t in their first year with their current team is Michael Malone. He has been the head coach of the Nuggets since 2015, and has been a huge reason for their rise to the top of the league over the last 8 years. This may be his finest work yet, as he has Denver sitting atop the Western Conference with a record of 39-18. They have a 4.5 game lead over the second-place Grizzlies, an astronomical gap given how tight the rest of the conference is.
Having the front runner for MVP on your team helps. It also helps when that guy is a center that is averaging a triple-double. But any coach that has his team in first place in a bloodbath of a conference should get Coach of the Year consideration, and Malone is on the outside looking in, sitting at +425.
Grizzlies head coach Taylor Jenkins is the next coach listed, at a very distant +1000.
