Predicting which Sacramento Kings players will win awards this season
By Mat Issa
Clutch Player of the Year (CPY): De'Aaron Fox and DeMar DeRozan
As we've already discussed, the Kings will have no problem closing out tight games this season. They already had Fox – the aforementioned CPY winner in 2022-23. And now, they've added DeMar DeRozan – the individual who finished 2nd in the category last year (and third the year before).
Conventional wisdom will tell you that the two of them being on the same team will actually hurt their chances of winning CPY. No one will vote for DeRozan if he is losing out on buzzer-beating opportunities to Fox, and vice versa with Fox.
However, we've seen in the past that the NBA will sometimes give out co-award winners. For instance, in 1994-95, Grant Hill and Jason Kidd were named co-ROY winners (that is actually one of three times in NBA history that has happened).
This is only the third year the NBA is offering the CPY award. So, we haven't seen any instances of their being co-winners yet. But can you imagine how great of a story it would be for the NBA if they had a team with two elite closers tag-teaming narrow victories together? They could call them the "clutch brothers," kind of like how Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire were called the "Bash Brothers."
I can see the commercials now. Tune in as the Golden State Warriors come to town to showdown against the "clutch brothers." Yes, this needs to happen.