Draymond Green Explained Why He Doesn’t Think Victor Wembanyama Should Win DPOY This Year

Victor Wembanyama has been nothing short of sensational as a rookie, and even with Chet Holmgren being one of the three best players on the current 2-seed in the West, the Spurs budding star looks like he’ll run away with Rookie of the Year honors.

That’s a testament to the production he’s been putting up over the past couple months, since the Spurs started taking the training wheels off, and while the offensive output is impressive, it’s his defensive stats that are truly outrageous. Wembanyama is averaging 3.4 blocks per game, comfortably leading the league in that category (2.7 is the next best), while also getting 1.3 steals per game (T-12 in the NBA). He has 17 games with 5 or more blocks, including a 5×5 game and a triple-double with blocks.

For that reason, he’s coming up in the Defensive Player of the Year conversation. It seems like a foregone conclusion that, at some point, he’ll start piling up DPOY wins, but former DPOY Draymond Green explained on his podcast why he doesn’t think this year should be when he gets his first.

Green is right that it would be an outlier for a guy to win the award on a bottom-dwelling defense, and I think he will ultimately be correct and Wemby will have to wait until the Spurs are a bit better before he gets in the mix for DPOY. The real shocker here is Green praising Rudy Gobert, who he has a long history with (most recently choking him out earlier this season). That says an awful lot about the year Gobert is having anchoring Minnesota’s defense, which has been the best in the NBA wire-to-wire, as Green is not one to go out of his way to hand out compliments to the big Frenchman.