Cavs just-miss on another award as Garland is MIP runner-up

After years in the wasteland for NBA awards, the Cleveland Cavaliers capped off their breakout season with a number of finalists in the trophy race. Rookie phenom Evan Mobley finished second to Scottie Barnes for Rookie of the Year, Kevin Love is in the top-3 finalists for Sixth Man of the Year, and on Monday evening it was announced that Cavs point guard Darius Garland finished third in the voting for the NBA’s Most Improved Player award, with Ja Morant of the Memphis Grizzlies winning the award.

Garland had a breakout season of his own, making his first All-Star Game in his third season in the league. He ranked 18th in the league in scoring at 21.7 points per game, 4.3 points more than last season. He set career-highs in assists, rebounds, steals, 3-pointers and free-throws.

Darius Garland finished third in the voting for Most Improved Player this season, a reasonable place to land but also another near-miss for a Cavs player

The Most Improved Player award, like many NBA awards, has nebulous criteria. How do you measure improvement? Is it the player who increases their points-per-game average the most? How do you filter for increased playing time? Should young players in their second or even third season be disqualified?

Lately, the award has seemed to acknowledge those players who took one of the hardest steps, from being a good player to being an All-NBA player. Paul George, Goran Dragic, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Victor Oladipo, Julius Randle and now (almost certainly) Ja Morant all made their first career All-NBA team the year they won Most Improved.

Morant won the award with a bit of a cushion, but it certainly was not a landslide. The top of the MIP ballot was crowded with players — crowded, in fact, with young point guards who all broke out this season.

Ja Morant was a deserving winner, leading his Grizzlies team to the second-best record in the NBA and putting his stamp on the league with both production and pizazz. Dejounte Murray finished second, making his first career All-Star Game as a 25-year-old drafted six years ago; all of the other players to receive votes were in their first four seasons in the league.

Coming into the season Morant, Murray and Garland were all popular picks to win the award, as were Miles Bridges and Jaren Jackson Jr. who all made the Top 10 in voting. Jordan Poole and Desmond Bane, who finished just behind Garland in fourth and fifth in the voting, were out-of-nowhere picks; they would win “Most Surprising” but weren’t in the All-NBA mix at the end of the season.

Reasonable cases could be made for any of the Top 10 to win, and it’s incredible that the top six finishers and nine of the top twelve were guards. Many of those guards are busting out in the playoffs as well. In many years the top of the ballot is a mixture of players truly on the rise and others who simply had a breakout year and look poised to fall back to the pack; last year Julius Randle won the award, for example.

This season is different, as every player near the top of this list looks like they will develop into an annual All-Star candidate or more, and some could be in the MVP mix as early as next season. Garland would have deserved to win, but so did everyone else in the mix. The future of the NBA is exceptionally bright.

The future is bright in Cleveland too, because for the first time in years they aren’t left out in the cold while other teams boast the truly exciting young talent. Garland is simply one part of a young core that looks poised to explode into something truly great.