Ben Simmons (Photo : Nick Laham/Getty Images)
The NBA individual awards are given shortly at the end of the regular season. While it's a tight race for Most Valuable Player, the Rookie of the Year award seems to belong to one team already.
The Philadelphia 76ers went through a tough "Process" to position themselves to draft the top talent entering the league. They have achieved that when they got three top-3 picks in consecutive years. But somehow, they haven't won Rookie of the Year yet.
This year will be different. According to CSN Philly, the odds of Joel Embiid, a center they drafted third overall in 2014 but has been injured and only played this season (qualifying him as a rookie) has "overwhelming odds" to take the plum to Philly.
"No rookie has come close to Embiid's numbers, and again keep in mind he's done this on a 28-minute restriction. There are actually three rookies averaging more minutes than Embiid, who leads first-year players in points, rebounds and blocks.
Milwaukee Bucks point guard Malcolm Brogdon is second in Bovada's Rookie of the Year odds at 20/1," Corey Seldman of CSN declared.
But even if Embiid does not get the award, primarily because he is injured again, teammate Dario Saric is being pegged as a worthy alternative.
"Dario Saric, Buddy Hield (NO), Brandon Ingram (LAL), Jamal Murray (DEN) and Pascal Siakam (TOR) are tied at 33/1," the article stated.
Absent from the list is Ben Simmons, the Philadelphia 76ers first overall draftee. According to Mike Sielsky of Philly.com, the team should just freeze him for the season instead of putting him at risk since his foot has not yet healed.
"Now that we know that Simmons' right fifth metatarsal bone - the bone that he broke on Sept. 30, the injury that has kept him from playing in a single regular-season game for the 76ers - is still not fully healed, the Sixers' next course of action is clear: stop the obfuscation and subterfuge. Call a news conference. And without equivocation, without putting coach Brett Brown in that familiar position - forcing him to say something that eventually could come back to compromise his integrity - announce that Simmons will not play this season," Sielsky argued.
If Embiid or Saric eventually wins the Rookie of the Year award this season and Simmons enters as a rookie next year, he will be a legitimate candidate from the onset.
While it's not a substitute for any degree of team success, winning two straight Rookie of the Year awards would give some validation to "The Process" and also something to cheer about from the starved Sixer fans.
