Dont give suns fans a bad name please.

I’m worried about you

Not as bad as last year, but certainly not good.

Yes

He’s closer to Ben Simmons than we are to him.

He is bad relative to being a center. Anyone his size has baseline abilities that come with that but in terms of skill, not much

Queta has quietly become one of my favorite rising players this year. Easily the 5th MIP at least based on impact this year for me.

The Thunder have like 3 or 4 guards on their bench who could potentially be starters on another team lol

Yeah, he’s incredible. Chet is the best and most impactful defender from OKC, but just a small step down from that I think Dort, Cason, and Caruso are all in the same tier. They are All-NBA level defenders, if they are healthy and playing enough minutes, which is mainly what holds back Caruso. Dort doesn’t generate as many steals, but he’s the best at wearing down the other team’s best player, and really making them work for everything. It’s great to start the game with and not let them get in rhythm. Caruso is a great disruptor, very good on ball defender, and anticipates the best out of all 3. Then Caso is a great mix of Dort and Caruso, just a bit smaller, but with the best hands out of them. He’s like a smaller Kawhi with how he can just strip the ball right away from some of the best ball handlers in the league. If he can learn some of the anticipation from Caruso, he’ll be a DPOY level guard defender, although he will probably never win the award due to his position and Wemby existing.

Lead the league in total steals.

I used actual, not expected.

I excluded the players who are ineligible (65+ games of 20+ minutes).

I excluded the players who are ineligible. Barnes is 10th among eligible players.

Also, incoming soon is a game where he explodes for 7 threes right when C’s need it. Don’t sleep on the Buffalo

Chet is arguably the best non Wemby defender in the league. His rim defense metrics are insane and his overall defensive metrics are also great and the eye test backs it up. He’s just unfortunately in the very tall, very lanky shadow of someone who will probably end up as the greatest defensive player ever.

100% should have. I wish that 6th man of the year voters cared about more than points because he is a 6th man of the year caliber guy

Yeah my fair is that Chet potentially gets fucked because of injuries

He also played every single preseason, regular season, and post season game 2 seasons ago like 97 games total. His rookie injury and the hip injury last season were both freak extremely rare injuries so im not gonna label him fragile yet.

those were one off injuries not the type that “injury prone” players get

I think people are gonna be surprised when Chet turns into a (relative) iron man. Both his major injuries were freak bone injuries and won’t have any impact on future health at all. Hes had zero real soft tissue injuries which is what becomes a recurring issue

Good. 😤

I think he probably will at one point. Wemby will win most of them but people kinda just assume he’s gonna be healthy for 10 straight years. Which is practically impossible for most superstars, especially someone that lengthy.

The media loves Wemby, and I think social media doxxing/death threats have mostly ironed out the spite votes these days

Well yeah why would a obvious mvp play defense… /S

I don’t think you can call Wilt more dominant (compared to the league at the time) when Bill was always right there, also averaging 20 and 8. Chet and Rudy have put out DPOY level defense this year but there’s no debate between them and Wemby.

Yes, however we also have a lot less data. Less footage and the box score of the era tells us nothing about defense at all. I would personally put Wemby and Russel as the top 2 defenders OAT. You can’t reasonably put one above the other because we just can’t really say for Russel. There is footage of course but not nearly as much as for active players

Almost every game- he wasn’t as good as last year, but figured he was still good enough to warrant a vote. His offensive game declined way more than his defensive did. Obviously I didn’t watch the other DPoY contenders, though.