Stevens’ snub predictably revealing

To summon outrage over something as forgettable as an NBA coach of the year award seems like a misuse of neurons, and surely someone as cerebral as Brad Stevens would advise against that.

One can imagine Stevens reacting to a snub like the one he received Wednesday, when The New York Times reported he got exactly zero votes for the award voted on by his peers, with the same stoic expression he seems to have on the Boston Celtics sideline regardless of momentary circumstance.

(If you want to see the best example of this, go find Butler’s improbable buzzer-beater in 2013 to beat Gonzaga and focus on Stevens, who remains arms folded and expressionless as Roosevelt Jones steals an inbounds pass, then throws in a floater from the foul line for the win. It’s stone cold.)

That’s not meant to deify Stevens as a supreme basketball intellect floating above the awards inanity that churns debate in tidy 45-second TV segments. I just figure he probably has better things to do.

NBA coach of the year, after all, is a particularly forgettable and meaningless designation, never more evident than by the fact Toronto’s Dwane Casey won it roughly 24 hours after having to answer questions about whether he was worried about getting fired.

And there’s certainly no award that could amplify about Stevens what is already selfevident: If he’s not the best coach in the NBA, he’s one of the very few who elevates the profession to an art.

While it seems incomprehensible that none of Stevens’ counterparts would vote him coach of the year given all the injuries Boston endured to win 55 games and reach the Eastern Conference finals, it does echo of a sentiment we’ve heard over the last week regarding another rising NBA coach who happens to be a woman.

When news filtered out that Becky Hammon would get an interview for the Bucks’ head coaching job, there was at least a vocal minority of handwringers focused not on her gender but rather the idea that she was “skipping the line.”

The argument goes like this: Hammon didn’t play in the NBA, has not been a head coach at any level and has only four years of experience with the Spurs, none of which were in the lead assistant chair next to Gregg Popovich.

If we take that argument purely at face value and ascribe none of the Hammon backlash to sexism, what we’re left with is a mentality that values paying dues over talent. Which seems at least like a cousin, if not an outright sibling, to the lack of recognition for Stevens.

It’s only human to resent the idea that somebody younger, with fewer traditional qualifications, could do the job better.

Whether Hammon will make a good NBA head coach isn’t something that seems particularly knowable either way. The public sample size consists of coaching the Spurs’ summer league team, a flimsy basis on which to form an opinion.

But dismissing the glowing endorsements from Popovich and others within the Spurs organization as predictable propaganda seems just as silly as taking them as gospel. At some point, it will come down to an NBA front office having wellresearched conviction about whether Hammon can do the job, the same way Danny Ainge did about Stevens. Then we’ll see what happens.

Ainge was dead right. Stevens’ skills not only translated from the Horizon League to the NBA, they arguably sharpened by going up against the best basketball minds in the world day after day.

So imagine being an NBA head coach, or someone who’s on a long path to becoming one, and seeing Stevens waltz into the league with one of the premier franchises, having no experience or real knowledge about pro basketball and be granted savant-like status among the basketball cognoscenti within his first few years.

It’s not hard to understand how that might rub some people the wrong way or, at the very least, inspire them to look elsewhere when they’re filling out a coach of the year ballot.

Even if any answer other than Stevens is patently ridiculous.