Lakers' Anthony Davis irate over not being Defensive Player of the Year finalist
The NBA announced the three finalists — the three top vote-getters — for Defensive Player of the Year on Sunday: Rudy Gobert, Bam Adebayo and Victor Wembanyama.
Anthony Davis — and plenty of Lakers fans online — are livid that the Lakers center is not on that list. Here is what Davis told ESPN’s Dave McMenamin.
"I'll never get it," Davis told ESPN when asked about the award. "They're not giving it to me. The league doesn't like me. I'm the best defensive player in the league. I can switch 1 through 5. I can guard the pick-and-roll the best in the league, from a big standpoint. I block shots. I rebound.
"I don't know what else to do. I'm over it. I'm just going to do what I got to do to help the team win and try to play for a championship. Accolades and individual awards, I'm done with those."
Let's try to provide some context. I cannot speak for other awards voters, but I can try to peel back the curtain a little on what I was thinking. With that, there are two parts:
1) Anthony Davis was on my ballot.
2) He was close to not being there. The reality is there are four very qualified players for the award: Davis and the three players named as finalists. Both with the eye test and statistically, Gobert was No. 1 — the anchor in the paint of the best defense in the NBA this season. Other players may think he’s overrated, but this was maybe his best defensive season. That leaves three guys for two spots.
The case against Davis is this: The Lakers were 17th in the league in defense this season (16th if you remove garbage time) — he didn't lift the Los Angeles' defense very high. Lakers fans counter that Davis was cleaning up the mess of poor perimeter defenders and Los Angeles would have been much worse without him, except that the Lakers defense was just 1.8 points per 100 possessions better with him. In comparison Adebayo was asked to do everything for a top-five defense and it was 2.5 per 100 better with him. While the Spurs' defense sucked it was 5.8 per 100 possessions better when Wembanyama was on the court — and the Spurs' defense with Wemby was better than the Lakers' defense with Davis. Plus, Wembanyama aces the eye test.
One of the reasons Gobert has three DPOY trophies at home already is he led an uninspiring group of Utah perimeter defenders — Donovan Mitchell was a target for opponents — to the top of the defensive ratings while he was in Utah. That's the standard. Even if the defenders around him are poor, making a defense basically average isn't going to win Davis or anyone else the award.
It comes down to what each individual voter sees and prioritizes. Having seen a fair amount of Davis in person this season and seeing how good he was influenced my decision (I saw Wembanyama and Bam a couple of times), as did other factors.
That said, Davis should be a First-Team All-Defense lock. To me, there was a very clear top four, and the only questions were "Who gets left off the DPOY ballot?" and "Who is the fifth player for First-Team All-Defense?" (I voted Herb Jones).
The Lakers hope Davis can use this as fuel in their first-round series against the Nuggets, where the team needs to find a way to slow one of the more efficient offenses in the league.
