Victor Wembanyama winning DPOY is gross. We're now just rewarding players for being unnaturally tall at this point. What a joke. Wembanyama just became the first unanimous Defensive Player of the Year in the history of the award. One hundred out of one hundred media voters gave him the first-place nod. Not a single voter looked at the rest of the NBA and thought someone else deserved it more. Not one. In the 44-year history of the DPOY award, nobody had ever achieved that. Not Ben Wallace, who came closest at 116 of 120 votes in 2002. Not Hakeem Olajuwon. Not Dikembe Mutombo. Not any of the truly transformative defenders who have won this award over four decades. And the reason Wembanyama got it unanimously is the same reason he should not have gotten it at all: the NBA cannot stop rewarding a player for being 7-foot-4 with an 8-foot wingspan. Wembanyama's defensive numbers this season were impressive on the surface. He led the league in blocks at 3.1 per game, which was 1.2 blocks ahead of the next closest player. He finished with 197 total blocks. He maintained a low foul rate relative to his block totals, meaning he was not recklessly chasing blocks. According to tracking data, the Spurs were significantly better defensively with Wembanyama on the court than off it, with his on-off differential estimated around 10 points per 100 possessions. Those are elite numbers. Nobody is pretending they are not. But here is what those numbers do not tell you: the San Antonio Spurs were not the best defensive team in basketball. They were not even the second best. The Defensive Player of the Year did not play on the top-ranked defense, and he got 100 percent of the first-place votes. Chet Holmgren, who anchored what multiple analysts called the best defense in the tracking era for the Oklahoma City Thunder, the team with the actual best defensive rating in the league, received zero first-place votes. Zero. That tells you everything about what this award actually was. It was not a defensive award. It was a Wembanyama award. Holmgren averaged 1.9 blocks per game this season on the team with the best defensive rating in basketball. The Thunder were the number one seed. Their defense was historically elite. Multiple analysts noted that in any other year, Holmgren would have been the runaway DPOY favorite. Instead, he finished second in voting with 76 second-place votes and not a single first-place vote, because the media had already decided this was Wembanyama's award before the season was over. The case for Bam Adebayo is even more damning to the narrative. By multiple on-off metrics, the Heat were a dramatically better defensive team with Adebayo on the court than without him. His on-off defensive impact was widely reported as one of the largest in the league this season, and by several estimates it exceeded Wembanyama's by a significant margin. Adebayo does it with versatility that Wembanyama cannot match. He switches onto guards, hedges ball screens, recovers to the rim, and plays passing lanes. He averaged over a steal per game while also being one of the best help defenders in basketball. Wembanyama had 1.0 steals per game. Adebayo's defense has no physical cheat code. He is 6-foot-9. He does it with footwork, positioning, and basketball IQ. He did not make the final three in DPOY voting. Ausar Thompson of the Detroit Pistons averaged 2.0 steals and 0.9 blocks per game on one of the top defensive teams in the NBA. He was a DPOY finalist and finished third. Thompson is a wing defender who disrupts offenses from the perimeter, which is arguably more valuable in the modern NBA than rim protection, because the league has shifted to a three-point-driven game where the ability to defend on the perimeter matters more than the ability to swat shots at the basket. But Thompson is 6-foot-7, so he does not get the same awe factor that Wembanyama does, and the voters treated him accordingly. The problem with Wembanyama's DPOY case is not that he is bad at defense. He is clearly an excellent defender. The problem is that the unanimous vote was driven by spectacle rather than substance. His blocks are spectacular. They go viral. They dominate highlight reels. A 7-foot-4 player with an 8-foot wingspan swatting a shot into the third row looks like the most dominant defensive player alive. But blocking shots is the most visible and most overvalued defensive statistic in basketball, because it measures one specific skill at the expense of everything else a defender does. The best defensive players in the modern NBA are not necessarily the best shot-blockers. They are the players who prevent shots from being taken in the first place. They are the players who funnel ball handlers into help, who rotate on time, who switch without getting cooked, who close out without fouling. Wembanyama does some of this. His length deters shots in ways that do not show up in the box score. But his perimeter defense is limited. His steal rate is average for a DPOY candidate. And when opposing teams adjusted to his tendencies during the season, they found ways to attack his aggressive shot-blocking style and force him into foul trouble and timing issues that were not part of the highlight reels. Then there is the offensive factor. Wembanyama averaged 25.0 points, 11.5 rebounds, and 3.1 assists this season. He was named an All-Star for the second time. He was in the MVP conversation. He is the most exciting player in basketball and the face of the league's future. The DPOY award is supposed to be about defense exclusively, but when you are the most famous player in the sport and you also happen to block more shots than anyone else, the voters are going to give you the award. The unanimous vote was not a reflection of unanimous defensive superiority. It was a reflection of how the NBA media has collectively decided that Wembanyama is the next transcendent superstar and every award he is eligible for should be his. This is the Rudy Gobert problem all over again, except bigger. Gobert won four DPOYs largely on the strength of rim protection and defensive rating, and he was criticized every single time for being a limited defender who benefited from his size and the Jazz's system. The difference is that Gobert at least played on teams that consistently had top-five defenses when he won. The Spurs were not even a top-two defense this year. If Gobert had won a unanimous DPOY on the third-best defensive team, the backlash would have been enormous. Wembanyama gets a pass because the narrative around him is bigger than the narrative around the award. The youngest DPOY in NBA history. The first unanimous selection. Those are the headlines, and they are designed to make you feel like you just witnessed something historic. You did. You witnessed 100 media voters collectively deciding that the tallest, longest, most physically gifted player in the league deserves the defensive award because he looks like a defensive player of the year rather than because he was clearly better than every other defender in the league. Chet Holmgren on the best defense in the tracking era says otherwise. Bam Adebayo's massive on-off defensive impact says otherwise. Ausar Thompson anchoring one of the best defenses in the league as a wing says otherwise. Wembanyama is a generational talent. He might win five DPOYs before his career is over. But this one was a coronation, not an evaluation. And the unanimous vote did not prove he was the best defender in basketball. It proved that the media had already made up its mind.

Its a DISGRACE the best guard in basketball chooses to play like this 🤢🤢🤢 The league has to stop rewarding this or else the game will die 👊

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