Iowa Basketball: Why Luka Garza should win National Player of the Year

4) Contributions to team success

This is perhaps the biggest argument for Toppin’s NPOY candidacy, and for good reason. No one expected Dayton to be where they finished up and no one knows where they could’ve gone considering how well they were playing at the end of the year (I felt like they were a Final Four team but, sadly, we will never know).

However, it’d be foolish to simply discount Garza’s accomplishments and impact because the Hawkeyes went 20-11 in the nation’s toughest league.

How many of you expected Iowa to finish tied for fifth in the Big Ten coming into the season? And how many expected that after star point guard Jordan Bohannon was ruled out for the season with a hip injury in December?

I certainly didn’t. In fact, I thought the Hawkeyes would struggle mightily and miss the NCAA Tournament altogether because of the lack of eye-popping talent on the roster. Instead, that didn’t happen – and Garza was the reason why it didn’t happen. He stepped up and carried a lesser team to a 20-win season, a mark they couldn’t have dreamed of reaching without him.

Team success is and should be a big part of the National Player of the Year discussion, but the focus should be on how the individual player impacts his team’s success rather than just how the team does overall.

Dayton had a really good all-around team and Toppin benefited from that. When he didn’t play his best against teams like UMass, Saint Louis, and VCU, he had other players like Jalen Crutcher and Ryan Mikesell there to pick up the slack. There were also games where he simply didn’t have to be Obi Toppin because his teammates went off.

You can’t knock Toppin for that, but you also have to acknowledge that Garza didn’t have that luxury. Iowa needed Garza to play at a high level every single night, and that’s exactly what he did.

Given how valuable Garza proved to be for Iowa, along with the historic production against elite competition, he deserves to be named National Player of the Year