The San Antonio Spurs have announced that they will hold a press conference on Tuesday, and immediate speculation is that it is to announce one of their players - or coach - have won an award.
The Spurs are going to have a press conference tomorrow to announce a major award. Got to be Manu as 6th Man or Pop as COY. My guess is Pop
— Dave McMenamin (@mcten) April 21, 2014
Joakim Noah was announced as the league's Defensive Player of the Year on Monday, and the league usually announces all non-MVP awards at some time during the first round of the playoffs.
The most likely announcement is that Gregg Popovich is the league's Coach of the Year, simply because he deserves it. Not only did the Spurs have the league's best record, with a three-game cushion, they did so without asking a single player to play 30 minutes a game, the first time a team has done that since the ABA/NBA merger.
Popovich won the award in 2002-03 and again in 2011-12, but is generally considered a perennial favorite given his reputation as the best bench boss in the game.
Another possibility is that Manu Ginobili is the league's Sixth Man of the Year, an honor he would be winning for the second time (he also took it in 2007-08). The Agrentinian came off the bench for all but three of his 68 appearances, averaging 12.3 points, three rebounds and 4.3 assists and shooting 46.9 percent from the floor.
While he ranked just seventh among reserves in Basketball Reference's Win Shares metric, he ranked third on a per-minutes basis. He was also second in player efficiency rating (20), 14th in scoring average and third in assist average. You can definitely make a case, though Taj Gibson Markieff Morris and Jamal Crawford probably loom as favorites.
There's an outside chance Patty Mills could be the league's Most Improved Player, too, though that seems an even longer shot than Ginobili's case given that Mills has performed at this level before and only played 18.9 minutes a game.
