2015-16 NBA G League Finals

Result

Finals MVP: Jarnell Stokes

Sioux Falls' first D-League title, clinched 91-63 in Game 3. Stokes added the Finals MVP award to the regular-season MVP award he had already won that year.

Games

Finals context

The 2015-16 Sioux Falls Skyforce entered the Finals off a genuinely historic regular season, having won a league-record 40 games, and closed it out by beating the Los Angeles D-Fenders in a back-and-forth, three-game series that gave the franchise its first D-League championship (and its third professional title overall, having also won two Continental Basketball Association crowns, in 1996 and 2005, before the CBA folded and Sioux Falls joined the D-League). The series itself see-sawed before Sioux Falls pulled away: the Skyforce won Game 1 at home 104-99, Los Angeles answered on the road with a 109-102 win in Game 2 to even the series, and Sioux Falls then closed out the title in dominant fashion, routing the D-Fenders 91-63 in Game 3. The individual storyline of the postseason belonged to forward Jarnell Stokes, who had already been named the league's regular-season MVP and then added the Finals MVP award on top of it, becoming one of the relatively few players in league history to sweep both honors in the same season. Sioux Falls' championship run was further recognized league-wide: head coach Dan Craig won Coach of the Year, and guard DeAndre Liggins was named Defensive Player of the Year, giving the Skyforce three major individual awards to go with the franchise's first title in this era of the league. This championship also carries a documented research correction worth flagging: a Spanish-language Wikipedia list of Finals MVP winners names T.J. McConnell, rather than Stokes, for this season. Two independent sources firmly contradict that claim -- Stokes's own biographical Wikipedia page states plainly that "he added to his regular season MVP award by garnering the Finals MVP," and a contemporary CBS News/Associated Press report on the championship stated directly that "Sioux Falls' Jarnell Stokes was named most valuable player of the finals" -- meaning Stokes, not McConnell, is the correctly documented Finals MVP for 2015-16, which is what this file records. For Los Angeles, the runner-up finish came as the Lakers' D-League affiliate, a franchise that would be renamed the South Bay Lakers within the following couple of seasons but is properly recorded under the D-Fenders name that was actually in use for this Finals appearance, its second championship-round trip of the decade following the 2011-12 loss to Austin. Sioux Falls' 40-win regular season stood as a league benchmark for consistency during this era, a marker of just how thoroughly the Skyforce, playing as the Miami Heat's D-League affiliate, had built one of the league's more stable and successful franchises heading into the second half of the 2010s.

Sources

• CBS News (AP) — Heat Affiliate In Sioux Falls Wins D-League Championship
• Wikipedia — Jarnell Stokes
• Wikipedia — Los Angeles D-Fenders / South Bay Lakers