Cooper Flagg won NBA Rookie of the Year, but Cedric Coward still gave the Grizzlies a result worth circling. Coward received a third-place vote and finished in the top five in the award race after a rookie season that began with uncertainty and ended with him standing among the class’s most productive players.
The Grizzlies traded up to the 11th overall pick last summer to take Coward, a move that drew questions because of what Memphis gave up. By the end of the season, he had answered with 62 games, 13.6 points, 5.9 rebounds and 2.8 assists, then added a top-five finish in voting that put him alongside Jaylen Wells and Zach Edey as recent Memphis rookies to land that recognition.
The path there was not clean. Coward missed Summer League because he had not fully recovered from shoulder surgery, and he opened the preseason with a shaky offensive stretch before earning a starting job during the year. That matters because the Rookie of the Year conversation was built around Flagg and Kon Knueppel, with the first four picks in the 2025 NBA Draft filling the spots above Coward in the voting.
For Memphis, the result turns a trade-up that once carried real risk into a stronger argument for patience. Coward was not the name driving the rookie debate in the way Flagg was, but he finished the year where the Grizzlies needed him: productive, available and already part of a growing run of Memphis rookies who have been noticed in the league’s most visible first-year race.
