It’s award season in the NBA and today I’ll take a look at the top Sixth Man of the Year candidates. Not only will I try to predict who will win the award, I’ll also discuss who should win win the award. Those are two separate questions and they may have two separate answers.

First, to narrow down the candidates, I took a look at the winners from the past 10 seasons:

Notice that all 10 winners had the following in common:

— They started fewer than 45% of their teams games.
— They averaged at least 11.6 points per game.
— They averaged at least 18.9 total points, rebounds and assists.
— They were all on teams that won at least 47 games. Eight of 10 winners were on teams that won 50+ games.

Using this criteria to narrow down the legitimate candidates for the 2011 Sixth Man award, we’re left with this list of 11 candidates. To give us a little leeway, they all started less than half of their teams games, they averaged at least 17.3 total points, rebounds and assists, and they play on teams that have at least 38 wins on the season.

I also included Efficiency Per Minute to see how productive each player is in the minutes he gets. Bigs tend to do better in this statistic because it’s easier to post rebounds than it is to register assists and big men tend to shoot at a higher percentage because they play close to the basket (so they have fewer misses, which weight efficiency down).

A simple search on the internet seems to reveal two major candidates for the award — Jason Terry and Lamar Odom. I included Marcin Gortat just to illustrate how good he’s been in Phoenix, but the bottom line is that the Suns don’t have enough wins to justify a place for Gortat on the short list. Plus, he took over the starting job recently, so he’s not really a sixth man anymore.

Interestingly, Terry’s teammate, Shawn Marion, deserves mention but isn’t getting much love. He has a higher EPM and averages almost as many points, rebounds and assists as Terry.

So who deserves to win?

If I had a vote (which I don’t), I’d cast if for Lamar Odom, who has been outstanding for the Lakers this season, averaging 14-9-3 coming off the bench in 57% of his team’s games.

But there’s a good chance that Jason Terry wins the award since he’s the highest scoring player of any of the guys on the list. As John Schuhmann of NBA.com notes, of the last nine winners, seven have gone to the player who had the highest scoring average. One other point in his favor is that he is more of a sixth man than Odom, since he only started 13% of his team’s games.

But I’d go with Odom, and I think he’ll win it. What about you?