Players Most Likely To: Vice Sports NBA Superlatives For The 2015-16 Season

Since the NBA awards its players for basketball excellence and not for doing the things that we watch the NBA to see, we've decided to 1) devise our own awards system, and 2) predict who will win these awards this season. For maximum impact, please imagine each of these honors announced in the same clear, declarative legalese that Adam Silver used to ban Donald Sterling for life.

Cutest Friendship: Draymond Green and Steph Curry, Golden State Warriors

Curry and Green's bromance, which has thus far involved a grape-throwing incident at an NFL playoff game and Curry advocating heavily for Green to "get that cheddar" over the summer, will achieve new heights in 2015-16. On a particularly successful road trip—during which the Warriors' spacing is so good that players are making three-pointers while dangling from the JumboTron—Green will have Steph sit on his shoulders, and Curry will have his daughter/human meme Riley sit on his shoulders, from which position she will score 12 points in 15 minutes. The Warriors will win the championship again, but they will also sweep the Teen Choice awards, despite being very bad boys. As such, they'll also claim the year's "moral complexity ribbon." As is the custom, Green and Curry will celebrate their Cutest Friendship victory by going to a Dave And Buster's in Santa Clara and cheering for each other a lot. — JW

Team Most Likely to Watch Air Bud Together: Utah Jazz

Visualize to the best of your ability the rosters of all 30 NBA teams. Now dredge up memories of the 1997 dog-playing-basketball film Air Bud, which exposed a massive oversight in the rulebook: "Ain't no rules says a dog can't play basketball." There's only one team in the league that could unironically enjoy the story of a strange boy dealing with the heartache of an absentee father by finding solace in his dog's skill at headbutting basketballs. It's those Salt Lake scamps, all of them about to hit basketball puberty in a glorious celebration of gangle and extreme Adam's Appling—the Utah Jazz. Quin Snyder is attempting to build something beautiful with his talented but unbloodied core of players born in the 90s. The final push in this long deliberate rebuild is Gordon, Rudy, Derrick, Dante, Alec, and the rest of these rascals sitting cross-legged while Quin Snyder queues up the laser-disc player. 44-38 season, toothy smiles. — AS

Weeping Jordan Grudge Magnet Award: George Karl, Sacramento Kings

Karl's long and grumpy career already gave him an inside track for this award, but he will lock it down in March, when DeMarcus Cousins makes his next public reference to "God's plan." Karl will interject when he hears this phrase spoken in his locker room, putting himself between Cousins and reporters to tell him that, "I'm the only God you need to worry about here, and my plan involves you not posting up so damn often." This will not yet be Karl's undoing, though—that, in the end, will be the work of Rajon Rondo, whose eighteen-month scheme to "eliminate" Karl actually began near the end of the '14-15 season. — JW

Player Who Makes You Want To Overthrow The Fucking Government: J.R. Smith

Now and forever. J.R.'s career is a true testament to the power of raw, uncut talent, the last man for whom extraordinary athleticism and a sweet-ass jumper is all you really need to get by, year after year after year. JR was touched by God, but he turned away and worshipped the Earth instead. Would that we were all equipped for that kind of war, to storm the castles of the establishment in the name of pure desire, take what belongs to us, live lives like kings. JR, and only JR, makes us feel this way. Accept no imitators (Nick Young). — CS

Most Likely to Be Revealed As A Time-Traveller On The Run: JaVale McGee

While we don't know exactly why JaVale is on the lam from futuristic bounty hunters, it's pretty clear that he's the sort of guy who surfs the waves of the fourth dimension and has fled from what is probably a dystopian future of android gestapo and human-insect hybrid oligarchies. Since he is an extremely tall gangly guy he found it all too easy to make millions of 21st century dollars playing basketball, whose rules he knows from cyber history lessons implanted in his brain at birth; damage to his operating system, suffered during cryosleep, periodically causes him to forget these rules and everything else, which is why he sometimes runs the wrong way or whatever. That JaVale is from another time—most likely a timescape in which sports has been outlawed by a genetically enhanced dictator known as The Overfather—explains quite a lot about his approach to the game. — AS

Player Corbin Smith Would Be Most Personally Afraid To Play Against: Glen "Big Baby" Davis

I can imagine what it would be like to play against most NBA players. I can sense Chris Paul beating me off the dribble, leaving me in a heap of shorts and hair somewhere past the three point line. I can imagine Rudy Gobert, standing at the free throw line extended, sniffing out my terrible cut to the basket, covering the space between us in seconds and barely jumping as he knocks the ball out of bounds, by way of bouncing it off my face. But of every NBA player, there is none I fear competing against more than Glen "Big Baby" Davis. He is large human being, in frame and in girth, and never seems totally in control of that sizable body. When I see him board, I can feel myself trying to box him out and getting knocked right onto the hardwood and covered in his prodigious sweat the SECOND he rises above me, felled by only the natural motion of his ocean. It haunts me. — CS

Least Valuable Journeyman: Sebastian Telfair

Almost gave it to John Salmons, but he's actually had his moments, such as they are. No, it's got to be a different sad bog roll. Prep-to-pro lad-man Sebastian "Bassy" Telfair was picked unlucky 13th in the 2004 Draft and immediately rocked the world like a hurricane, except on opposite day. Since that selection, Telfair has moseyed his way onto eight NBA rosters and still had time to spread his unique brand of room-temp basketball to China where he logged a 53-point game during a stint with the Xinjiang Flying Tigers and was nicknamed "Like Tears In Rain." Telfair is teleologically bound to end up on a new NBA team this season where he will score four points a game and dole out perfunctory high-fives. Some journeymen are vagabonds, some are lit fuses attached to Safeway brand dynamite, and some are just loitering ghosts named Sebastian. — AS

All NBA Pagan Team: Manu Ginobli/Lou Amundson/Andrew Bogut/Rajon Rondo/Arron Afflalo

The NBA is not exactly a hotbed of paganism, if we're being honest. We're looking at maybe twenty-five guys with pagan or pagan-ish beliefs, and as per unofficial "don't ask, don't tell" mandates, none of them are very open about it. Lou Amundson's Old Norse Odinism is probably the easiest to sniff out—the luster and length of his hair gives it away. Andrew Bogut's adherence to pantheistic druidry informs everything from his hatred of political correctness to his fear of rolling to the hoop. Arron Afflalo worships a malevolent Sun God, which explains his poor showing in the wet winters of Portland. Rajon Rondo's flirtations with Wicca are no secret, at this point; his warlockery has been shaky at best after what he described only as "some unpleasantness while antiquing" in Salem, Massachusetts back in 2013 . Manu Ginobli is simply is too proficient at knocking bats out of the air for us to believe he doesn't kneel at the altar of some branch of Italo-Roman neopaganism. The Sixth Man is Mo Speights, but you probably knew that. — AS

Worst Assistant Coach To Get Drunk With: Kurt Rambis

James Posey is the tempting choice because he might try to trip you on the way to the bathroom or punch you in the ass unexpectedly, but the obvious answer is also the right one, here: it just has to be Kurt Rambis. Once he gets on his "I was right to bench Kevin Love so Anthony Tolliver could get some burn" soapbox it's all over. Boring, dreary, he chews bar peanuts with his mouth open and drinks only Coors Banquet. No thanks. — AS

Most Likely to Quit Basketball For Literary Pursuits: Boris Diaw, San Antonio Spurs

Boris Diaw wrote a kid's book this summer, which was published by National Geographic. It's about hippos. While this may seem like a bit of light, fun summer stuff for an athlete out of season, it was in fact the germ of an existential urge. By January, it will overcome Diaw and force him to exit the Spurs Program and pursue his ambitions as a writer. Diaw will dive headlong into the hippopotamus as a (strained) metaphor for multiculturalism and the global economy, and write an ambitious social novel so heavy-handed—it will be titled The River Horse Who We Rode to Dry Death, and will be blurbed by both Michel Houellebecq and Alexis Ajinca—that it makes Jonathan Franzen join Twitter and start tweeting crying emojis. — JW

Player Who Most Resembles A Bong: Paul Pierce

Just look at him! There was clearly no other choice. The way his veteran torso makes a perfect, bong chamber-shaped curve, as if made from glass. Paul Pierce is, truly, the king of the Bong-lookin' ass ballers. — CS

Team That Will Play In Barclays Center: Brooklyn Nets

For the fourth straight year, Joe Johnson's Brooklyn Nets will "Get the Party Started" on 41 separate Brooklyn Nights. Fans, sitting in the darkness of theater lighting and definitely not falling asleep or tearing open sugar packets and then pouring them into a half-drank eleven dollar beer anything like that, will be whipped into a frothing madness that will spill out into the streets of Park Slope. Excited young men will order too many small plates in area gastro-pubs; non-members will attempt to shop at the food co-op, even though that is explicitly forbidden. Let us hope that these Brooklyn Nets will be boring, so that this destruction can be avoided. — CS