Minnesota Sports Forum

I can see LaVine clearly progressing, but Lip, I think the one thing you left out with LaVine is that while he might have a great blend of talent and skill, he's a long ways from controlling the game mentally like guys like Rubio/Westbrook/Curry/etc do. (i.e. he has a lot of wtf moments still)

But alas, he's only 20, and shown improvement in that area, so I'm excited to see what the future may bring with Zach.

I was reading zach lowe's grantland column and noticed he picked Wiggins for ROY, but also that he suggested that Mirotic could have won it if he had gotten more minutes earlier. After going back and looking at the numbers I realized that Mirotic only had one good month and that if we were going by that, Lavine could make the same argument.

Zach believes that numbers are harder to come by on a good team, which makes sense in that others are taking shots and rebounding at the same time. What he doesn't understand is that Wiggins is seeing doubles consistently because we don't have any other offensive weapons on a nightly basis until recently with Lavine. While I think putting up big points is tougher, doing it efficiently is harder on the lousy team IMO.

Either way, I think he gave Mirotic too much credit for what looks like one hot month of shooting. I doubt Mirotic is guarding the other teams best player on most nights like Andrew is. Don't get me wrong, as I really like Mirotic, but I just don't think his overall season is even close to Wiggins.

I always hate when people try to using winning as part of the rookie of the year evaluation process. This isn't the MVP conversation. If you put these rookies on good teams, half wouldn't play at all and the other half would be rotation guys at best and hardly the primary reason why their team is actually winning. Harden and Curry are the primary reasons their teams are winning. Mirotic is a bench player on a good team and if he was really that good he'd be in the 6th man of the year conversation. ROY shouldn't even be a debate this year.