This year’s ROTY race is very likely going to come down to Chet and Wemby. However, some of the discourse around this is confusing. An argument that’s being made against Chet is that his team is too good, and that he’s benefitting from that. While I don’t disagree, I’m looking back on the 2021 RoTY race, and the discourse was literally the complete opposite.

Evan Mobley was leading the race for most of the year, and a big reason for that is because his team was winning, and he was having a huge impact on it. The thing that seemingly flipped the race in Scotties favour was when the Raptors hit their 2nd gear and ended up passing the Cavs in the standings, which made the decision partly because Scottie was winning more. So why was team success one of the top swing factors in 2021, but is suddenly a negative this year to be on a winning team?

You see this with things like the MIP, DPoY etc where one set of criteria applies for certain players, and then is completely disregarded for others. Why is that the case? I know it’s human nature to flip flop on things like this, but in the end the constant shifting goalposts hurt the consistency and relevancy of these awards.