Morant chosen top NBA rookie
LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. — Memphis Grizzlies point guard Ja Morant wants someone to give him a big assist after running away with the NBA’s rookie of the year award. Tell him the name of the lone voter not to put him first. “I want to shoot a direct message to them and thank them for motivating me even more to do more on the floor, be better and do whatever I can to help my team win basketball games,” Morant said Thursday night. Morant received 99 of the 100 first-place votes. The first Grizzlies player to win since Pau Gasol in 2001-02, Morant averaged 17.8 points and 7.3 assists during the 2019-20 season, with last year’s No. 2 overall draft selection picking up three Western Conference rookie of the month awards along the way. Kendrick Nunn of the Miami Heat was second and No. 1 draft pick Zion Williamson of the New Orleans Pelicans was third and got the other firstplace vote. Nunn, who was undrafted, averaged 15.3 points in 67 regular-season games, all of them starts; Williamson averaged 22.5 points and 6.3 rebounds, though he missed much of the season due to injury. The balloting took place in July, before the season restarted at Walt Disney World. Games that occurred through March 11, the day the league shut down because of the COVID-19 pandemic, were the ones taken into account by voting panel of sports writers and broadcasters.
› Steve Nash was one of the NBA’s most entertaining point guards, the engineer of a high-scoring team that helped usher in a new era of basketball. Now the Brooklyn Nets want to see what he can do as a coach. The Nets hired Nash on Thursday, putting the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Famer in charge of the team that hopes to have Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving together next season. Nash, a two-time league MVP as the playmaker of the Phoenix Suns teams under coach Mike D’Antoni that piled up points and 3s long before they became the norm in the NBA, had been a player development consultant with the Golden State Warriors, where he worked with Durant. Warriors coach Steve Kerr was the general manager in Phoenix for part of Nash’s time and took elements of the Suns’ system in winning three NBA titles.