Defensive Player of the Year
1. Bam Adebayo, Heat
2. Marcus Smart, Celtics
3. Mikal Bridges, Suns
The first thing that jumps out is the name that isn’t there. Rudy Gobert ranks at or near the top of the NBA in blocks, defensive rebounding, and contested shots. He’s holding opponents to 50 percent shooting at the rim—sixth best out of 259 players to face at least 100 up-close shots, according to Second Spectrum. And while the Jazz’s defense on the whole has dropped from first last season to 11th this season, that’s been more about how much things fall apart when he’s not around.
But while Gobert remains excellent, the blah overall nature of Utah’s season felt like an occasion to open the door to some new blood—and, with it, a consideration of different types of defensive value in 2022.
Reasonable people can differ on which perimeter defender is the NBA’s best, but Bridges belongs on any short list. I’m not sure anybody in the league equals his ability to battle top offensive threats (he ranks 13th out of 260 players to log at least 1,000 minutes in average defensive matchup difficulty, according to The BBall Index’s defensive charting) and the availability to do it night after night (he leads the NBA in total minutes and is on pace to play in every game for the fourth consecutive season). His brilliance lies not in the traditional statistical markers of defensive success, but rather in the stuff that never makes its way to the stat sheet.
Bridges’s talent for tirelessly chasing the game’s best shooters and scorers all over the court, denying the ball, and plugging up passing lanes with his 7-foot-1 wingspan allows Phoenix’s bigs to focus on dropping back to smother the paint. His ability to slither around screens and stay connected to his man helps keep those bigs out of the kind of danger that can come with having to deal with both a driver and a roller barreling downhill at them. It allows aging genius Paul to roam off the ball, forever looming and ready to wreak havoc on the weak side of the action. It simplifies everybody’s else’s responsibilities and lets them just lock in on a smaller portion of the game plan with confidence that the other team’s no. 1 option is taken care of. Having an answer for the scariest perimeter question makes Monty Williams’s life a lot easier; it also makes Bridges the linchpin of the NBA’s no. 2 defense and worth every penny of the $90 million extension he got before the season.
Like Bridges, Smart operates as one of the NBA’s top perimeter stoppers; unlike Bridges, his impact is anything but quiet.
The 28-year-old is forever flying all over the floor in hot pursuit of another possession. Beyond the chaos he creates, Smart’s greatest value might lie in how his strength, length, intelligence, and tenacity allows him to guard players at all five positions; that enables the Celtics to both switch screens more often and allow fewer points per chance on switches than any other team in the NBA this season, according to Second Spectrum’s tracking data, a huge reason why Boston boasts the league’s stingiest defense.
There’s plenty of credit to go around in Boston: the emergence of spring-heeled big man Williams, the presence of a pair of excellent big wing defenders in Tatum and Jaylen Brown, the resurgence of Al Horford in his second tour of duty, the arrival of perfect-fit guard Derrick White, etc. All of it, though, traces back to the “stretch 6” who can not only bang with opposing bigs, but actually bully them.
Smart and Bridges recently made their DPOY cases by emphasizing the different and, to their way of thinking, tougher challenges that premier perimeter defenders face, such as staying in front of the league’s toughest covers and keeping them from getting to their preferred spots in the first place. Gobert and Embiid (another legitimate candidate for this award) made theirs by highlighting the global impact of a great defensive center—the back-line captains who see the whole floor, who call out the coverages, who dissuade drivers from even attempting a shot.
In presenting their arguments, though, they inadvertently made one for Adebayo—the player who does all of that better than anybody else in the league.
Miami ranks fourth in defensive efficiency this season, behind Boston and Phoenix, but the Heat crank it up when Bam mans the middle, with a mark nearly two points per 100 stingier than the Celtics overall. Crucially, though, Bam doesn’t stay in the middle: No screen defender switches onto ball handlers more often than he does, according to Second Spectrum, and few stonewall them more effectively.
Bright-eyed ball handlers who draw Adebayo and think, “OK, I’ve got a center, that’s a mismatch,” quickly find themselves disabused of that notion: He allows just 0.9 points per chance after those switches, 10th fewest of 181 players to log at least 200 switches. And trying to take him one-on-one is worse: He’s giving up just 0.74 points per isolation, according to NBA.com/Stats, 12th lowest among 112 players to defend at least 50 isos.
He handles his business without giving up the store inside, too: With him on the floor, Miami clears the defensive glass at a league-best level and prevents at-rim attempts at a top-10 rate. He can slide into the zones that Erik Spoelstra loves to deploy to short-circuit offenses, sink in a more traditional drop pick-and-roll coverage if the opponent calls for it, deny passes into the post against bigger and burlier threats, hedge at the 3-point arc or blitz the screen—you name it, he can do it.
The one knock on Bam’s case is missed games. Because of a torn thumb ligament earlier this season, he’ll wind up with fewer than 60 games and 2,000 minutes played. It doesn’t necessarily have to be disqualifying, though: Gobert’s first DPOY came in 2017-18, a season that saw him come in beneath those marks, too. In the absence of a no-doubt-about-it alternative, I feel OK going with a switch-everything swingman the size of Karl Malone, a legit shot blocker and paint patroller faster than most point guards—a dude who looks like the next evolution of NBA defense, and whose play will go a long way toward determining whether Miami can make their second Finals run in three seasons.
