The Profoundly Weird Race for Rookie of the Year

If you’re an avid listener of the Bill Simmons podcast1, you might have heard a recent bit he did with Zach Lowe, where they pondered whether this was the NBA’s weirdest season ever. For what it’s worth, excluding global pandemics, that claim has a lot of merit. The Clippers started the season near the bottom of the league amidst allegations they paid Kawhi Leonard 28 million dollars under the table; a gambling scandal led to the arrest of a coach and a player on the third day of the season; Bam Adebayo scored 83 points in a game; and fully a third of the league was literally trying to lose games.