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As we get closer to the end of the regular season, it’s only natural that award chatter will perk up. The narrative pendulum has swung quite a few times in the MVP race for example; Shai Gilgeous-Alexander vs. Nikola Jokić turned into an SGA unanimous shout, which led to Cade Cunningham and Jaylen Brown shouts, which set the table for Luka Dončić and Victor Wembanyama to make their presence (and strong cases) felt.
Are you excited yet? Are you tired yet? Don’t answer either of those out loud; I know you’re nodding, it’s fine.
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I always have a fun-yet-stressful time sorting through the various awards and related cases, even more so with the 65-game minimum to (officially) factor in, at least for now.
The All-Defensive teams are especially a doozy. Teams have different schemes, roles, and assignments to sort through. While it can be easy (though kinda irresponsible) to stack a bunch of numbers together to glean offensive value and impact, you can’t really do that to the same degree on the defensive end.
You should be watching games to put numbers into their proper context anyway, but you really have to do it to put together coherent thoughts defensively. We went in-depth on this on Tuesday’s episode of The Dunker Spot.
This article serves as my attempt to highlight the top (eligible) candidates for this year’s All-Defensive teams, and ultimately list what my two teams would be as of March 27. First, let’s get some disclaimers out of the way.
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As a reminder, to qualify for the major awards — Sixth Man of the Year, Clutch Player of the Year, Rookie of the Year, and the All-Rookie teams are exempt — a player must appear in 65 eligible games out of 82, or roughly 79% of a team’s games. By eligible, I mean a player must log at least 20 minutes in a game for it to count toward the total. The rule allows for two “freebies” — games where a player doesn’t hit 20 minutes, but logs at least 15 — that’ll count toward the total.
To that end, here is a list of notable players who are either ineligible now or, as…
Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/nba/article/the-nbas-top-all-defensive-candidates-heres-your-guide-to-a-doozy-of-an-awards-race-210405977.html
Author : Nekias Duncan
Publish date : 2026-03-27 21:04:00
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