New York (AFP) – NBA Rookie of the Year Karl-Anthony Towns and Latvian center Kristaps Porzingis were unanimous selections to the NBA All-Rookie First Team announced Thursday by the league.
Towns, a Dominican-American 7-footer (2.13m) for the Minnesota Timberwolves, was a unanimous pick as the NBA Rookie of the Year with 18.3 points and 10.5 rebounds, both best among all NBA newcomers with the 2015 top NBA Draft pick’s boards ranking eighth in the league.
Towns, one of only six players to start every regular-season game, blocked 1.68 shots a game and connected on 54.2 percent of his shots from the floor, also ranking eighth in the league in that department.
Porzingis, a 7-foot-3 (2.21m) center for the New York Knicks, scored 14.3 points and grabbed 7.3 rebounds a game while leading NBA rookies with 1.86 blocked shots a game. The fourth overall pick in the 2015 NBA Draft was the highest-scoring Knicks rookie since Mark Jackson in 1988.
Joining the 20-year-olds on the all-rookie lineup chosen by a media panel were Phoenix’s 19-year-old American guard Devin Booker and two other centers, Denver’s Nikola Jokic of Serbia and Philadelphia’s Jahlil Okafor from the United States.
Booker averaged 13.8 points, sinking 99 3-pointers during the season, and topped rookies by sinking 84 percent of his free throws.
Jokic, taken 41st overall in the 2014 NBA Draft, averaged 10.0 points, 7.0 rebounds, 2.4 assists and 1.00 steals a game while shooting 51.2 percent from the field.
Okafor averaged 17.7 points, 7.0 rebounds and 1.15 blocked shots a game.
The NBA All-Rookie Second Team included Miami’s Justise Winslow, the Los Angeles Lakers’ D’Angelo Russell, Indiana’s Myles Turner and Sacramento’s Willie Cauley-Stein — all from the United States — and Denver’s Emmanuel Mudiay, a 20-year-old guard from the Democratic Republic of Congo who played last season in China before being taken seventh in the 2015 NBA Draft.
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