Utah Jazz: Reevaluating Jordan Clarkson’s Sixth Man of the Year award
It’s not very often that a team rosters the league’s two leading candidates for a single award, but that’s exactly the position the Utah Jazz found themselves in last season.
If Jordan Clarkson hadn’t been named the NBA’s Sixth Man of the Year, Joe Ingles would have been. It almost seems like a logical contradiction. How can both men be the team’s sixth man?
Nonetheless, voters didn’t seem to have an issue with any contradiction. The two Jazzmen dominated the voting, with Jordan Clarkson receiving 65 first-place votes, and Ingles receiving 34. The next leading vote-getter was Derrick Rose.
He received a single first place vote.
Obviously, Clarkson took home the award, and his Australian teammate seemed entirely happy for him. In the opinion of some, however, the question remains: did Joe Ingles deserve the NBA’s 2020-21 Sixth Man of the Year award?
The case for Utah Jazz forward Joe Ingles as 2020-21 Sixth Man of the Year
In part, it depends on an individual’s perception of what the criteria for the award ought to be. Jordan Clarkson certainly fits the conventional mold of a sixth man more. The 18.1 points per game he poured in for the Utah Jazz was by far the leading mark for their second unit. In fact, it was the leading second unit average in the National Basketball Association.
Clarkson was Quin Snyder’s spark plug, and we’re not here to suggest that he wasn’t an invaluable member of the Jazz last season. In very absolute terms, he was.
However, if one’s criteria for the Sixth Man of the Year award is simply the best player to come off the bench in a given season, Joe Ingles has a strong case as the deserving recipient of the 2020-21 NBA Sixth Man of the Year Award.
Firstly, Ingles is not as talented a scorer as his counterpart, but he is the superior playmaker, averaging 4.7 assists to Clarkson’s 2.5 per game last season. Obviously, that’s not enough to make the case that Ingles deserved the award. A look at the advanced metrics, however, may lead Utah Jazz fans to question the outcome of this individual award race.
Ingles bested Clarkson in virtually every advanced measure. He generated 7.0 win shares to Clarkson’s 4.2. He finished with a 3.4 Box Plus/Minus (BPM) to Clarkson’s 1.1, and he had a 2.5 Value Over Replacement Player (VORP) to Clarkson’s 1.4.
Clarkson did best his teammate in Player Efficiency Rating (PER) by a mark of 17.1 to 15.9, however, it’s worth noting that PER represents an aggregated measurement of a player’s statistical output. In other words, Clarkson’s superior scoring average boosts his PER significantly. All of the advanced metrics that measure a player’s on-court impact outside of conventional counting statistics suggest that Ingles was the more valuable member of the Utah Jazz between the two.
To some extent, one’s choice boils down to personal preference. Scoring is often regarded as the most valuable skill in basketball, and with good reason. On the other hand, Ingles was a better defender, playmaker, and floor-spacer than Clarkson in 2020-21. Scoring may be the most important skill, but when a player is more skilled in almost every other facet of the game, it should at least weigh into anybody’s comparison between two players.
The debate between the two leading Utah Jazz candidates for the 2020-21 Sixth Man of the Year trophy is emblematic of a larger debate within NBA circles. The “pure hooper” school-of-thought would invariably prefer Clarkson, regarding anybody who felt otherwise as a “stat boy” or, even more derisively, a “casual”. Meanwhile, lovers of advanced metrics certainly preferred Ingles’ case.
Of course, as with any debate, the nuance falls somewhere in between. Advanced metrics are a meaningful measurement of player production, but NBA fans who follow the numbers but neglect to watch the games do themselves a disservice (and not just because watching games is more fun than reading numbers). You cannot wholly comprehend how a player impacts his team without watching them play.
Still, if you strictly watch games without paying any attention to advanced statistics, you’d better watch every team’s 82 games in their entirety. Otherwise, you’re likely to dismiss stats that don’t align with the impressions you’ve personally garnered from the games you have watched, falling victim to confirmation bias.
Even those who watched the Utah Jazz on a regular basis last season could be forgiven for feeling torn on this debate. Undeniably, Clarkson’s off-the-bench scoring provided the team with considerable value, but so did Ingles’ diverse skillset.
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Ultimately, this is a low-stakes affair: both of these men are proud members of the Utah Jazz. It is safe to assume that had Ingles won the award, Clarkson would have been congratulatory in turn. They were two of the best bench players in the Association last season. However, if you put much stock in advanced metrics, you may feel like the voters got it wrong in the 2020-21 season.