Award season is quickly approaching and the No. 9 Texas Tech basketball team has two, possibly more, candidates for some of the top awards to be handed out by the Big 12 Conference at the end of the regular season.
Grant McCasland has one of the votes for the all-conference awards and said last week that team success is the biggest indicator for who he votes for on his ballot.
In my perspective, in regard to all conferences, it’s teams that win,” McCasland said. “We’re going to pick off of whoever’s winning in this league, first and foremost.”
By McCasland’s own standard he and the rest of the Red Raiders (22-7, 13-5) have good cases to be included for some of the most notable all-conference awards. Entering the week tied for second in the Big 12 standings, McCasland has a good argument for being the league’s coach of the year.
Meanwhile, JT Toppin could also be in line to be a first-team all-Big 12 selection, if not earning player of the year honors outright.
“I think he’s probably had one of the best runs toward the second part of (the season), McCasland said of Toppin. “But he missed a month with a lower-body injury and didn’t practice for a month. That’s a significant part of it. Then what he’s done in the second half is what everybody sees what he’s capable of, what he could have done from the beginning.”
Who else should be up for the Big 12 coach and player of the year, and what kind of cases do McCasland and Toppin have to earn those honors?
The case for Texas Tech basketball’s JT Toppin for Big 12 player of the year
There appear to be three strong candidates to take home Big 12 player of the year in Toppin, West Virginia’s Javon Small and Kansas’ Hunter Dickinson.
Last year’s winner, Jamal Shead, wasn’t among the top stat stuffers in the conference last season, though his impact as a whole was obvious to anybody who watched the Cougars. The same could be said for Toppin and Small while the argument for Dickinson is mostly stats-based.
