Point Guards vs Center
Before I get into specific statistics that prove that Ayton deserves the award over his contemporaries, let’s also specifically pay attention to their positions: both Doncic and Young are point guards and thus primary ball-handlers.
They run their team’s respective offenses, so even if they are equal to or not quite as talented as Ayton, they are going to have the ball in their hands far more often giving them a much greater opportunity to impact a game than a center who must have the ball provided to him via a guard in the cycle of the offense.
That alone should be a gigantic (Ayton-sized) benefit of the doubt for the Phoenix Suns’ rookie: his team didn’t even have a qualified point guard on the roster and yet he still averaged a double-double.
Looking back at the the (true) centers to win Rookie of the Year dating back to Shaq in 1992-93, their point guards were:
2015-16 – Karl-Anthony Towns (Ricky Rubio, Andre Miller, Tyus Jones)
2001-02 – Pau Gasol (Jason Williams, Brevin Knight, Elliot Perry)
1992-93 – Shaquille O’Neal (Scott Skiles)
*Emeka Okafor won the award in 2004-05 with stats almost entirely identical to Ayton’s this season, plus his Charlotte Bobcats won only 18 games that season (their expansion year). However, he played primarily power forward with Primoz Brezec starting 71 games at center. / Tim Duncan won in 2001-02 but also played power forward as he comprised the second half of the Twin Towers with David Robinson.
Take literally any one of those point guards at that exact moment in their careers and place them on the Phoenix Suns this past season and they are the best point guard on the roster, worthy of starting every game.
Make that happen, and there are very few people in the Valley of the Suns who would not believe at that point that Ayton would have received those few additional accurate passes into the post where he needed them, every game, bumping his scoring average up to 20 points per game, and becoming that 20/10 player that so many fans hoped he’d be right out of the gates.
Now, again, he still did average a double-double, the only rookie in the league this season to do so, and the first since Karl-Anthony Towns in 2014-15 and the second true center since Shaq did so 26 years ago.