No vote for the NBA’s regular-season awards was closer than the one for 2014 Sixth Man of the Year. We knew it was coming, but now it’s official: Clippers guard Jamal Crawford barely edged Taj Gibson of the Bulls and third place finisher Manu Ginobili of the Spurs to win his second Sixth Man of the Year award by a scant 26 points once all the votes were tallied.
Per the NBA’s official release:
The Los Angeles Clippers’ Jamal Crawford is the winner of the 2013-14 Kia NBA Sixth Man Award as the league’s best player in a reserve role, the NBA announced today. Crawford, who came off the bench in 45 of the 69 games in which he appeared, led all NBA reserves in scoring, averaging 18.6 points. Additionally, Crawford accounted for 3.2 apg and 2.3 rpg in 30.3 mpg for a Clippers team that went 57-25 and earned the No. 3 seed in the Western Conference playoffs.
Crawford, who also won the award in 2009-10 while with the Atlanta Hawks, joins Kevin McHale, Ricky Pierce and Detlef Schrempf as two-time winners. Crawford amassed 57 first-place votes and 421 total points from a panel of 125 sportswriters and broadcasters throughout the United States and Canada. Taj Gibson of the Chicago Bulls finished second with 395 points (49 first-place votes) and Manu Ginobili of the San Antonio Spurs finished third with 138 points (nine first-place votes).
Dime’s own contributors voted runner-up Taj Tibson as our 2014 Sixth Man of the Year, with Crawford finishing second. But the voting was really tight as the results show:
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As Jamal told us in a phone interview we conducted before the regular season ended, team success takes a back seat to individual accolades, but he’s gotta feel happy about becoming just the fourth NBA player in history to capture two Sixth Man of the Year awards.
The 34-year-old ball-handling dynamo never met a pair of ankles he couldn’t tie up and deserves the hardware, even if there were plenty of deserving candidates this season.
What do you think?
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