On Thursday, the NBA announced that Celtics guard Malcolm Brogdon won the 2023 Sixth Man of the Year award.
The accolade wasn’t a surprise. Straw polls showed Brogdon had a lead over Knicks guard Immanuel Quickley, and Brogdon comfortably beat him 60-34 in first-place votes and 408-326 in overall points.
A great sixth man is often an odd mixture of things — talented enough to score like a star, self-aware enough to realize that sometimes he needs to take a secondary role, confident enough to take a primary role when necessary, and smart enough to know when to toggle back and forth between primary and secondary.