So, I opened up my Outlook Express the other day to check my e-mail, and found the following e-mail from the Seattle Supersonics:

SONICS SUPERNET NEWS FLASH - APRIL 4, 2002
Brought to you by the Seattle Sonics & Storm

VOTE NATE FOR 'COACH OF THE YEAR' and DESMOND FOR 'SIXTH MAN'

Now is the time for all good Sonics fans to come to the aid of their team!

NBA.com is running polls asking fans who they would vote for as the NBA's "Coach of the Year" and as the NBA's "Sixth Man of the Year."

As a member of the Sonics faithful, here's your chance to support a coach and player whose dedication to the Green & Gold is returning Seattle to the NBA's elite!

1. VOTE FOR NATE...

Remind the nation that this year's top coach in the NBA is "Mac-10" Nate McMillan! Please cast your vote for Nate by clicking on:

http://www.nbateamnews.com/i.cfm?DID=177180&UID=46350363&MID=223521

2. VOTE FOR DESMOND...

He's the second-year Sonics sensation who is turning heads throughout the league with his stellar defense, sweet shooting touch and monster dunks. To cast your vote for Seattle's fiery sixth-man who ignites the Key, click on:

http://www.nbateamnews.com/i.cfm?DID=177181&UID=46350363&MID=223521

I'm sure a number of you probably saw at least something about this, or perhaps even received the e-mail yourselves. And maybe out of that group, I am completely alone in that I was remarkably pissed off after reading this.

I think one line in particular bothered me about this e-mail: "Now is the time for all good Sonics fans to come to the aid of their team!"

Since the start of the season, I've attended 35 Sonics games, and I haven't missed one since December -- despite the fact that I supposedly split one season ticket with my brother. I've written about 25 columns about the Sonics for this website, and about the same number for BskBALL.com. That's in addition to writing 76 game recaps and somewhere around 70 previews.

I don't know about you, but I think all of that makes me a good Sonics fan.

Apparently the organization thinks that the determining factor is whether I feel that Nate McMillan should be Coach of the Year and Desmond Mason Sixth Man; as if no logically-thinking Sonics fan could possibly come to the conclusion that anyone else was more deserving.

Okay, okay, yes, you've got me. This is nothing but a stupid poll at NBA.com that we're talking about. Thankfully, the NBA has so far successfully kept the voting out of the hands of fans (I can just imagine -- Michael Jordan gets MVP . . . next season, despite being retired). That said, this e-mail seems to be emblematic of the feeling sweeping the Puget Sound that McMillan and Mason should be considered for these prestigious honors.

And, like most of these 'arguments', it lacks anything in the way of substantial argument for why exactly McMillan and Mason are deserving. I'm not expecting a term paper on the subject, mind you -- not even anything as detailed as this column would humbly provide in defense of any argument -- but gee, "Remind the nation that this year's top coach in the NBA is 'Mac-10' Nate McMillan!" just ain't doing it for me. How about you?

Coach of the Year is really a funny award, isn't it? In reality, it should be titled something entirely different, because it isn't given to the best coach -- not even to the extent that MVP is given to the best player. No, instead, imagine if we based MVP voting on what we expected a player to achieve versus what they did. Who would win this year? Maybe Earl Watson would be a candidate. Anyway, my point is that the Coach of the Year history doesn't exactly read like a Who's Who of the coaching fraternity.

Did you realize Mike Dunleavy won one? He did, three years ago . . . now Maurice Cheeks has coached the pants off of Dunleavy with his effort this season. For that matter, I've never thought of Dunleavy as anything better than an average coach. Did Pat Riley become a better coach after he stopped winning championships in LA? By my way of thinking no, but by this award, yes -- he didn't win with the Lakers but has won once apiece in New York and Miami. And three of the better coaches of the past decade in almost anybody's books (even if some of this year's work might disagree) are Rudy Tomjanovich, Jerry Sloan, and George Karl . . . but none has won a Coach of the Year.

But even using this award's fatally flawed criteria, is Nate McMillan a viable candidate? Well, in the humble opinion of this website, probably not. The Sonics may have overachieved compared to The Sporting News' moronic pre-season prediction that they'd be the 26th-best team in the NBA -- worse than Golden State, mind you -- but yours truly predicted 47 wins and Heavy D 46. Both are reachable within these final two weeks, but the Sonics are hardly going to shatter them.

Injuries have hurt the Sonics, but a similar complaint can be made in other quarters. The Los Angeles Clippers, for example, have gotten just 29 games from erstwhile star Lamar Odom and 14 from contributor Keyon Dooling. Starter Corey Maggette has also missed a number of critical games down the stretch.

While Calvin Booth may have been the Sonics' pre-season starter, you'd be hard-pressed to find many fans who believe that Jerome James is a significant downgrade. There are those, myself perhaps included, who would call the injury to Vin Baker a blessing, if only because it allowed the Sonics' to find an offense all their own.

That leaves three really costly injuries, in my opinion -- Desmond Mason's sprained knee, Vladimir Radmanovic's sprained toe, and Rashard Lewis' sprained ankle. (A good argument could be made for including James' sprained ankle in that list, but who's to say that he would have even been playing much as was with Booth and Peja Drobnjak healthy.) Mason's injury caused the Sonics to collapse, going 1-5 in his absence, but he only missed six games. Even if Lewis is out the remainder of the season, he'll only have missed 10 games, and it's hard to blame the last three losses on his absence when taking into mind that the Sonics beat San Antonio and Portland back-to-back without him. Then there's Radmanovic's injury, which has cost him a month, and a costly one for the team. Still, is this an injury epidemic of epic proportions? In my opinion, no. Yes, the Sonics might have won a few more games if everybody was healthy all season, but what NBA team couldn't say that?

If I'm to be asked, any chance McMillan had of getting my Coach of the Year vote went out the window last week. On Tuesday, he left the Sonics' reserves in too long as Houston was coming back before making a rookie mistake by not realizing that the ball was going to be inbounded on the baseline instead of the sideline on the Sonics' final real possession. That's understandable in the grand scheme of things -- he is basically a rookie head coach, after all -- but it still counts against him. The next night, McMillan's end-game strategy was again questionable, in that he had a cold Shammond Williams -- who had not played at all previously -- in the game. Williams wasn't intended to get the ball, but he did, and the Sonics unsurprisingly failed to tie.

Of course, if I'm going to sit here telling you that McMillan isn't the Coach of the Year, I should probably give my choice -- the aforementioned Cheeks. Actually, I suppose he kind of poses a problem, in that the Blazers have actually underperformed my expectations, at least in the first half. Nevertheless, from the game action that I've seen, Cheeks has really impressed me. And if you want to take the view that the Blazers' problems were more due to cohesion than anything else -- I don't -- the problem has clearly been fixed under Cheeks. Everything seems to point me to him.

As for Mason's Sixth Man canidacy, I think it's pretty legit. One factor particularly recommending Mason is the fact that he has played more minutes than any other player who has not started at least half of his games played. Minutes are a pretty nice simple approximation in value, and their main problem -- a player is playing only because of the lack of a quality alternative -- is not evident in this case. Additionally, minutes in themselves convey a certain amount of value. As long as a player is playing better than an alternative -- and Mason surely is -- the more minutes the better.

Again, however, I just don't think Mason stacks up to the competition -- namely, the Clippers' Quentin Richardson. These two guys are linked in my mind. Both are second-year swingmen who are physical for shooting guards. Both were drafted in the middle of the first round, with the Sonics passing on Richardson. Both have dramatically improved their jumpers -- and their overall games -- this season. Looking at the primary numbers, they're pretty close. But getting deeper into the secondary stats I prefer shows what I feel is a clear win for Richardson. A quick table:

Name	AdjO	A/TO	TS%	Pass	S/TO	PP48	RP48	Eff	Value	VORP
Mason	.928	1.03	.520	0.46	0.64	17.8	7.0	.459	1028	43
Richardson	.955	1.21	.525	0.70	0.78	24.0	7.6	.508	1015	136

Let me explain all of these numbers. Adjusted offense (AdjO) basically tries to provide an overall picture of a player's offensive contributions . . .though now that I think about it, those are inaccurate values because I messed around with the team stats. Still relatively close, I think. Assist/turnover ratio is rather self explanatory. Neither has a particularly good rating, but Mason's has historically been disappointing for a shooting guard playing small forward, and Richardson's is far better.

Pass is a stat I invented a week and a half ago to rate a player's passing ability. It simply takes assist/to ratio and multiplies it by assists/minute (and then multiplies the result by 10). This shows what I'd naturally suspect, that Richardson is a better passer (though neither is very good). Steals/TO ratio is more of the same; Mason, as I've contended all year, turns the ball over more than he should.

Using the per-48 minute numbers shows that Richardson has really been more effective than Mason this season, though in less minutes. He only has a slight advantage in points per game, but it's quite significant in points per 48 minutes.

Finally, the overall numbers. Because he's played a lot more minutes, the only category Mason wins is Value, which rates playing time extremely significantly. Everything else goes to Richardson by a wide margin, as does my vote for Sixth Man.