Mitch Johnson was just heavily disrespected in Coach of the Year race

The NBA just awarded Coach of the Year to Boston Celtics head coach Joe Mazzulla after leading his team to the second-best record in the Eastern Conference. Mitch Johnson should have earned this honor, but Mazzulla was a worthy winner of the award.

Most didn't expect a team that lost starters to free agency and Jayson Tatum to injury to be so formidable, so choosing Joe isn't the issue. The real problem comes when you see how few first-place votes Johnson received.

J.B. Bickerstaff is a great coach, and Detroit had a great season, but it's hard to reconcile a refusal to take preseason expectations into account for the Spurs while acknowledging them for another. Exceeding projections is exactly why Mazzulla won this campaign's COY honors. They skipped over Mitch, who did the same thing to place Bickerstaff in second place, and it doesn't make any sense.

No team outpaced projections more than the Spurs

If you checked the preseason predictions from all of the major players, San Antonio was only supposed to win somewhere between 40 and 43 games. Their first playoff appearance should have been via the play-in tournament if you let them tell it. 62 wins later, the NBA sat with their mouths agape at the accelerated growth of such a young ball club.

The Silver and Black only lost four games total over the last two and a half months of the season. (That stretch included beating Boston and Detroit, by the way.) If Victor Wembanyama didn't win Most Valuable Player of the Year and Mitch didn't win Coach of the Year, who gets the credit for the most impressive year in the NBA?

The Celtics' year was tremendous, but San Antonio's gets the nod by a slim margin by any reasonable standard. It's incredibly rare to see a lottery team make it to the second seed in the entire league in the very next season, and they didn't do it by leaning into one side of the game over the other. The Spurs finished the year top three in both defense and offense.

Mitch finished with a better record than Bickerstaff and Mazzulla. He had the youngest team of all the finalists. Only receiving nine first-place votes is just egregious. There is only one award, so only one coach can win it each year. But the voting needs to align with reality. It failed to reach that very simple standard this year.

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