Dyson Daniels has won the NBA’s 2024-25 Most Improved Player award, the league announced on Wednesday. Daniels is now the second Atlanta Hawk to win the award, joining Alan Henderson who won in 1998. The Hawks acquired Daniels, the No. 8 overall pick in the 2022 NBA Draft, in an offseason trade with the New Orleans Pelicans centered around Dejounte Murray. Daniels, along with Nikola Jokić, was one of two players who were named finalists for multiple awards. Daniels was also a Defensive Player of the Year finalist, but the honor went to Evan Mobley of the Cavaliers. Instead, he takes home the Most Improved Player trophy.
There was no obvious Most Improved Player winner this season, but the race boiled down to three candidates. Pistons All-Star Cade Cunningham fit the more recent bill of a highly drafted star on the rise. Every winner since CJ McCollum in 2016 had been a first-time All-Star in that season. That would have been Cunningham this season, but the voters ultimately elected to go in another direction.
The real competition came down to two players: Dyson Daniels and Ivica Zubac. The two made very different yet equally compelling cases. Daniels was not a consistent rotation player in New Orleans due primarily to his offense. He made great strides on that end of the floor this season, jumping from 5.8 to 14.1 points per game while becoming a serviceable 34% 3-point shooter. Couple that with his elite defense and Daniels went from a no-name to one of the more exciting young wings in basketball.
Daniels got 44 first-place votes to Zubac’s 23. Cunningham finished third, and 10 different players got at least one first-place vote. Here are the voting results:
NBA Most Improved Player voting results
Zubac is much older at 28. This is his ninth season, not his third, and he has steadily improved throughout his career. But with Kawhi Leonard out for the first half of the year and James Harden running the show as an elite pick-and-roll creator, Zubac was put in the perfect position to thrive offensively. His scoring jumped from 11.7 to 16.8 points per game this season. He, like Daniels, will make an All-Defense team for his work on a stellar Clippers unit. But the fact that his growth came later attracted some voters who prefer not to give the award to players ascending at more predictable points on the developmental curve.
In the end, the voters went with Daniels, a worthy winner. A year ago, he was a relatively anonymous youngster that barely played. Now he’s a core part of Atlanta’s future, one of the NBA’s very best defenders, and the Most Improved Player winner for the 2024-25 season.
