ROY Is Still Not a Close Race
The Utah Jazz are the NBA story du jour, as they’ve reeled off 10 wins and revived their previously flagging playoff hopes. In the midst of this run, their impressive rookie, Donovan Mitchell, has put up six games of 25 points or more, shouldering high creation responsibility, and playing a major factor in the team’s success. The highlight was a 40-point explosion against Phoenix, in which the Jazz won by 32 points. This has led many analysts to consider his candidacy for Rookie of the Year, and to speculate that he might have usurped Ben Simmons as the favorite for the award.
There is no feasible argument for this conclusion beyond Mitchell’s volume scoring.
Simmons vs. Mitchell: Offense & Usage
Mitchell currently leads all rookies in scoring at 19.5 points per game, and he’s doing it on above average efficiency, not merely due to opportunities. His has been a genuinely superb rookie campaign. However, scoring is the only category in which Mitchell leads rookies. Ben Simmons is currently second in scoring (and only slightly below Mitchell’s efficiency), tied with Lauri Markkanen as the leading rookie rebounder, and is leading the class in assists to boot.
The simplest heuristic for determining the ROY has been adding together players’ points, rebounds, and assists per game. Since 2001–02, the leader in this cumulative stat has won ROY every year except for two — Amar’e Stoudemire in 2002, and Malcolm Brogdon in 2017. This year, Simmons’ production dwarfs other rookies: His 31.4 cumulative per games are 5 full stats more than Mitchell, his closest competitor, who clocks in at 26.4. So by standard norms, Simmons should be the prohibitive favorite.
But per game statistics are a poor way of measuring player impact, so let’s look at some better points of comparison.
Both players have been concrete positives for their teams this season, making overall positive contributions by nearly any metric you might choose to look at. This means it is a good thing to have either of them on the court. Simmons currently leads all rookies in minutes played at 1849, over an extra 100 minutes more than Mitchell. This is a point that doesn’t matter in most cases, but in a close race, increased contributions through greater minutes totals could make a difference.
Simmons’ responsibility for the Sixers has been absolutely colossal this year. He is the primary fulcrum of their offense and one of only two true ballhandlers on the team. He sports a usage rate of 26.2%, an assist rate of 32.8%, and a combined USG+AST of 59.0%, according to Cleaning the Glass.
According to NBA.com, he leads the NBA(not just rookies) in touches per game, at a whopping 98.8, and is sixth in time of possession, behind only perennial All-Star caliber point guards — Westbrook, Harden, Wall, Walker, and Lillard. In both of these stats, Simmons has the highest output than any rookie since 2013–14, the first season that included tracking data.
Mitchell, too, has been asked to carry an enormous load for the Jazz. But it has mostly manifested in shot attempts. Usage rate is the only category in which he leads Simmons.
The one area in which Mitchell is clearly superior to Simmons is as a scorer. He takes more shots and makes them more consistently than Simmons does. However, in each case, the gap isn’t enormous. According to Cleaning the Glass, Mitchell scores at a clip of 109.3 points per 100 shots (roughly the equivalent of multiplying TS% x2), while Simmons is a little behind at 108.9. The volume matters, but this is hardly a chasm.
Most metrics see Mitchell as the better offensive player, a reasonable conclusion given the floor spacing he provides and his higher shooting value. BPM, RPM, and PIPM all prefer Mitchell. Again, the difference is not enormous, and is due almost entirely to Mitchell’s spacing and shot conversion. It is worth referring to Simmons’ vast advantage in assist rate (nearly double) in addition to his major AST:TO edge (1.97 to Mitchell’s 1.33).
It is the defensive end of the court, however, where the two are worlds apart.
Simmons vs. Mitchell: Defense
This is an interesting case in which college reputations continue to define prevailing opinions of two players despite their performances demonstrating the opposite. Simmons can charitably be described as disinterested in defense at LSU, while Mitchell’s bulldog like point-of-attack intensity was a key component of Louisville’s hectic D. At the NBA-level, however, their impacts have reversed.
Simmons is quietly putting up a defensive season that deserves consideration for 2nd Team All-Defense. While I would have to do serious research to consider whether he would merit a selection, he is well within the cohort of forwards (including teammate Robert Covington) who could slip into that second team.
Simmons’ rare confluence of mobility and size allows him to play as if he were both a wing and a big, a combination matched by only the best forward defenders in the league. In the last 5 years, only 17 players have put up a steal rate of 2.5% or better while also hauling in at least 16% of defensive rebound opportunities, according to Basketball-Reference. Nearly all of them are elite defenders — Kawhi Leonard, Pauls George and Millsap, Draymond Green, and Andre Drummond to name a few. Simmons has been doing just that this year, with a steal rate of 2.6% and a defensive rebound rate of 17.
Mitchell has not been a disaster, but he has also not been a revelation. He provides perfectly adequate point guard defense, but he doesn’t move the needle in an appreciable manner to the positive. Every advanced metric shows him as a slight negative defender this year, while the Jazz do not improve defensively with Mitchell in the lineup.
While comparing team ratings can be a bit tricky due to lineup construction, both players benefit from frequently playing next to a DPOY-caliber center. Simmons and Embiid have shared the court on just over 50% of Simmons’ possessions so far, according to Cleaning the Glass, while Mitchell and Gobert have only combined for 38% of Mitchell’s possessions.
Still the evidence seems overwhelming that Simmons is a far more impactful defender than Mitchell. This is borne out in overall advanced metrics, where Simmons is preferred across the board this year.
Game Score
In Mitchell’s favor, his eruption against the Suns was one of the best games of the entire season, not just among rookies. According to John Hollinger’s Game Score metric on Basketball-Reference, Mitchell received a 38.4. Should he be credited extra for games that demonstrate a higher ability?
We can compare the game scores of the two players in several ways. Clearly, Mitchell has the single best performance of the season, but is he otherwise reaching levels that Simmons is incapable of (See: Embiid, Joel and Brogdon, Malcolm). The answer is no, and in fact the reverse is true — Mitchell’s nadirs are far below those of Simmons.
While both players are capable of games scoring above 20 approximately a quarter of the time, Mitchell has 4 negative scores to Simmons’ none, and reaches his valleys more frequently. This becomes evident by comparing their game scores over 10-game rolling averages. Although each had superior scores for approximately equal amounts of times, Simmons’ consistency advantage is immediately clear, and his average peaks are higher than Mitchell’s as well.
(Edit: This is probably a better visualization. This maps each player’s Game Score ordered from worst to best game. With the exception of Mitchell’s two best games, every other data point favors Simmons.)
While Mitchell’s Rookie of the Year candidacy is not without merit, it still pales in comparison the Simmons’. By nearly every measure — simple counting stats, advanced metrics, usage load, even opponent strength — Mitchell falls short of Simmons’ outstanding rookie campaign.
The only clear advantage Mitchell has over Simmons after 50 games is in the number of shots he takes. Unless he can maintain All-Star level production for the final third of the season, it’s difficult to see him surpassing Simmons. A vote for Mitchell at this point might as well be an admission that you value volume scoring over all else; we have advanced beyond that point as a society in our understanding of basketball.
What about Jayson Tatum?
Tatum (and Kyle Kuzma) was the buzzy name at the beginning of the season, as he rode three months of hot 3-point shooting to a freaky level of efficiency in a small, well-defined role within Boston’s conference-leading team. However, the last two months have seen him undergo a predictable regression — pinky injury notwithstanding — that has dropped him well below the other contenders in this race.
While he still boasts excellent overall efficiency, he’s simply not asked to do anywhere near as much as the other two and rarely creates for his teammates. His combined assist and usage rates total 24.3%, less than the usage rate on its own for either Simmons or Mitchell. He also turns the ball over too much for his role — 81 assists to 78 turnovers — and while his defensive versatility and size are important to Boston’s scheme and league-leading D, he’s not anywhere near the caliber of defender that Simmons is.
Tatum remains an enticing prospect with a promising career ahead, but in a top-heavy ROY race, he has fallen off the lead pack.
