33-year-old Mills nets NBA award for sportsmanship

Brooklyn Nets guard Patty Mills was named the 2021-22 NBA Sportsmanship Award winner on Friday.

The 33-year-old veteran will take home the Joe Dumars Trophy after earning 58 first-place votes and 1,975 total points in balloting of fellow NBA players.

Denver’s Jeff Green (60 first-place votes, 1,841 points) was the runner-up in the voting. Miami’s Bam Adebayo (38 and 1,776) finished third.

Each NBA team nominated one of its players. From that 30-man list, a panel of league executives selected one finalist from each of the NBA’S six divisions. Current NBA players selected the winner from the list of six finalists, with nearly 300 players submitting their votes through confidential balloting conducted by the league office.

Mills is the first Nets player to win the award since its inception. Dumars, the Hall of Fame guard for the Detroit Pistons, was the inaugural recipient in 1995-96.

Mills averaged 11.4 points, 2.3 assists and 1.9 rebounds in 81 games (48 starts) in his first season with Brooklyn.

The Australia native owns career averages of 9.2 points, 2.3 assists and 1.7 boards in 820 games (105 starts) with the Portland Trail Blazers (2009-11), San Antonio Spurs (2011-21) and Nets.

The Charlotte Hornets fired head coach James Borrego on Friday after four seasons.

The Hornets had signed him to a multi-year contract extension in August but opted to go in another direction.

The team finished 43-39 in 2021-22 and reached the NBA’S play-in tournament for the second straight season. The Hornets lost the first play-in game each time, falling short of their first playoff berth since 2015-16.