Marcus Smart wins the NBA Hustle Award

[Silky]

How anyone can say trade Marcus Smart I have no idea. I understand his limitations, but THIS is the guy you want young players around.

And IMO there is still more upside to his game. We need to concentrate our efforts on bigs because he is capable of being a solid starting PG.

With those floating lobs he tosses to bigmen, he is very Paul-esq

That's high praise, but Smart generally doesn well in the pick-and-roll. He uses his body to keep the defender on his hip and then just waits for the help defender to bite. We haven't played much with big athletic centers who roll to the basket, but Smart (and Hayward) have had good success with Theis and Williams. Want to see much more of that.

He tossedba lob to horford in, what felt like, every game

Marcus is improving yearly.

Really good young player.

[Mike Pemulis]

Marcus Smart rules. Will replace Al as primary defender of Giannis.

[jambr380]

I’m pretty sure they created this award just for Smart. Either way, good that he gets the recognition he gets.

This award already exists since the founding of this gimmicky event in 2017. The very first winner was Patrick Beverly, followed by Amir Johnson (lol).

What's strange is that it is actually calculated on the highest aggregate hustle score. From nba.com:

The Hustle Award is given to the NBA player with the highest aggregate hustle score each year. The score is calculated on:
Players who played a minimum of 50 regular season games and at least 15 minutes per game.
Five hustle stats: Screen Assists, Deflections, Loose Balls Recovered, Charges Drawn, and Shot Contests.
Players were compared by position (G/F/C) within each statistic on a per-minute basis.
Within each statistic, a metric was calculated for each player based on his relative performance

Johnson finished his 14th NBA season, averaging the following hustle stats on a per-game basis: 2.5 screen assists, 1.0 deflections, 0.7 loose balls recovered, .08 charges drawn and 5.5 contested shots. Those five metrics gave Johnson the highest aggregate score, besting Indiana's Thaddeus Young, Cleveland's Larry Nance Jr., teammate Ben Simmons and New Orleans' Anthony Davis.

So, it's not just the eye test - Amir Johnson, in his 15.8 mpg in 2017-18, really did deserve it, and so did Marcus this year. Congrats, Marcus - this is exactly the type of award you deserve to win.

[timpiker]

Marcus is the glue of this team and has been for a long time.  I've always loved Marcus and truly hope he's a C for life.  He's been my fav for several years.