Sixth Man of the Year is a difficult award to hand out on a Hubert Davis coached teams. His aversion to substitution patterns, hierarchy, or regular minutes is well known by now. So there’s not a lot of empirical data to look at, a lot of intuition has to be taken into account.
Caleb Love, RJ Davis, and Armando Bacot were offensive usage monsters, so whoever came into games wasn’t counted on to score. If they did, it was a bonus, so the top bench contributor had to bring it on defense.
Also, as the old coaching saying goes, one of the greatest abilities a player can have is availability.