The 2026 Made-Up NBA Awards With Zach Lowe

April 6, 2026·2 hr 5 min·10 clips

Bill Simmons just compared Victor Wembanyama to a horror movie alien gaining intelligence.

The ad read clears out fast. Simmons pulls Zach Lowe into a live Netflix setup, mentions the Rewatchables and Lowe's Tuesday podcast, then gets to San Antonio against Denver. He calls it the game of the year, and the case is not complicated: Wemby and Joker make everyone sound a little too excited, though mostly for good reason. The awards section keeps the same loose rhythm. One pick is intentionally boring, because leading the league in made threes is a clean counting-stat argument. Boring can still win. Simmons links it to preseason betting markets, where Curry for threes and Wemby for blocks were the obvious chalk. The rookie shooter is the better story. Lowe and Simmons treat the move from no remembered odds to league leader as strange enough to deserve its own fake trophy. The Clay Thompson comparison gets tossed in, and not as some lazy young-Clay compliment. They mean peak-prime Clay, because the release already looks that fast. That leaves them half-amused, half-stumped. If the shot is already coming out that quickly, the next move is probably just taking it from deeper. The list gets messier after that. Zion playing 51 of 52 games earns a late nomination because availability is now part of the joke. Kalel Ware gets the weirder footnote: double-digit points and rebounds, seven blocks, and five steals off the bench had apparently never happened before. They like the oddity. The close swings back to Wemby, not as a finished myth, but as someone figuring out both ends while the Spurs learn where to throw the lobs. Jokic still has the full-season case. Wemby is the thing Simmons keeps watching.

As heard by us

Simmons and Lowe turn fake awards into a smart, loose map of a strange NBA season.

Bill Simmons and Zach Lowe use the Made-Up NBA Awards as an excuse to wander through the season's weirdest and most revealing NBA arguments. The San Antonio-Denver opener gives it real juice: Wemby and Jokic turn an early Saturday game into an overtime measuring stick, with MVP…

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Why you'd press play

Two NBA voices use a great Spurs-Nuggets game as fuel for awards no real committee would ever approve.

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