Predicting the NBA's Clutch Player of the Year winners if the new award had existed for the past decade
CBSN
The NBA's newest award would have gone to plenty of older stars if it had existed
On Tuesday, the NBA introduced a new award. The Jerry West trophy will be given to the league's Clutch Player of the Year, a fun if slightly ridiculous concept. Russell Westbrook led the NBA in clutch minutes last season, but those minutes represented less than seven percent of his total for the year. No player made more than 47 clutch field goals for the season, and nobody attempted more than 100. The season as a whole produced a meager 14 game-winning buzzer-beaters out of 1,230 games. That's a shade above one percent.
We're dealing with preposterously small samples here, but that's what makes things interesting. In theory, small samples offer plenty of opportunities for chaos. Does a superstar have to win this award? Only one player has hit multiple game-winning buzzer-beaters this season... and it's Atlanta Hawks rookie AJ Griffin. Could a player with a notoriously non-clutch reputation buck his own trends for a year and steal this award? It's possible. James Harden has led the NBA in clutch scoring, after all.
So let's look back at the last 10 years of clutch basketball and try to pick winners for an award that didn't yet exist to see what we can expect from it moving forward.
