The 2025 NBA regular season has come to a close, and the Detroit Pistons remain one of the league’s biggest success stories. In light of their historic turnaround, multiple key standouts find themselves in the running for seasonal awards.
Someone who has been front and center in an awards race for months now is Malik Beasley. Since joining Detroit in free agency last summer, he has been one of the league’s top reserve guards. Amid a career year that landed him in the history books, Beasley has been a prominent figure in Sixth Man of the Year discussions.
Following the conclusion of the regular season, the people at Bleacher Report gave their projections for who is going to take home every notable award. Beasley ended up getting snubbed for 6MOY to Boston Celtics guard Payton Pritchard. However, the journeyman guard did receive an honorable mention.
Detroit Pistons sharpshooter Malik Beasley actually leads Pritchard in threes per game, three-point percentage and net rating swing (the difference in a team’s net points per 100 possessions when a given player is on or off the floor).
Those indicators could make this race as close as any of the awards detailed here, but Boston’s team strength will put Pritchard over the top.
Along with appearing in all 82 regular season games, Beasley put together one of the best campaigns of his NBA career. He averaged 16.3 PPG off the bench while shooting a stellar 41.6% from beyond the arc on nine attempts per game.
The Pistons brought in Beasley for his three-point shooting, and he went on to put up historic numbers in this facet of the game. He fell just short of leading the league in made threes (Anthony Edwards hit one more than him) but still achieved a historic feat. This season, Beasley became just the fifth player in history to make 300 or more threes. It is even more impressive when you account for the fact that he did this while playing non-starter minutes.
6MOY is a neck-and-neck race between Beasley and Pritchard, and still could go either way. Only time will tell if his lights-out shooting will be enough to get him over the hump.
