NBA 2025: Why Dyson Daniels won’t win Defensive Player of the Year award, contenders, betting odds, Draymond Green, Evan Mobley

He is the NBA’s steals king and it isn’t even close, while when it comes to deflections there is a chasm between Dyson Daniels and the league’s next best.

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And yet, the Australian — now better known as the ‘Great Barrier Thief’ — doesn’t look to be much of a chance of taking out the NBA’s Defensive Player of the Year award.

At least, that is what the betting markets are suggesting, with Daniels a distant third favourite for the honour behind Golden State’s Draymond Green and Cleveland’s Evan Mobley.

Of course, it was Victor Wembanyama’s award to lose before he was ruled out for the rest of the regular season due to a blood clot in his right shoulder, while Memphis’ Jaren Jackson Jr. was also expected to be right up there in voting until suffering an ankle sprain.

But considering the historic season Daniels is having on the defensive end, why isn’t the Bendigo bandit considered a genuine chance of taking out the award?

Well, to start with, historically it is usually given to a big man as elite rim protection is valued more than perimeter defence.

After all, when Marcus Smart was named DPOY in 2022 he became the first guard to win the award since Gary Payton in 1995-96.

Daniels himself even admitted as much in an interview with HoopsHype late last month.

“I feel like it’s a big man’s award,” he said.

“If you look at the big men in the NBA today, usually the past few years, it’s been a big man in that conversation who protects the rim and gets blocks. Obviously, before Wemby went down, he was the frontrunner for the award.

“I think I do a little bit of everything on the floor. I protect the rim as a guard. I get steals. I defend well one-on-one and contest shots.

“I don’t want to talk about it too much. I let the people see it for themselves.”

The opposite is true for Green, but more on that later on.

Todd Whitehead of Synergy Sports recently posted a thread on X making his case for and against each of the DPOY contenders with interesting data visualisations.

While the numbers will obviously be different now given the thread was created on March 23, they still speak to the biggest strengths and holes in each candidate’s game.

For example, in the case of Daniels it isn’t hard to imagine what his DPOY argument would revolve around, although Whitehead also drew on drive stops and closeouts to make his point.

When it comes to steals, Daniels (213) sits 89 ahead of the next best in the league and is on track to finish with the most in the NBA since 1992 while his 401 deflections are 153 more than Kelly Oubre Jr. in second (248).

Of course, steals can be a misleading statistic as you can be an average or even poor defender and rack up a number of thefts in a game.

After all, if a player just loses his dribble and an opponent picks up the ball, that counts as a steal, which isn’t all that impressive right?

Although in the case of Daniels, the fact he is generating such a historic number of steals makes it obvious it’s no fluke while he also passes the eye test with flying colours.

Brad Rowland, who covers the Hawks for the Locked on Podcast Network, described Daniels as a “unicorn of a player defensively” in an interview with foxsports.com.au late last year.

“It’s a rare combination of a guy who can get those steals, get those deflections and also play this kind of solid one-on-one defence that you want a guy to play and do it without fouling,” he said at the time.

Sometimes the box score does tell the story of how disruptive Daniels can be, but often that alone doesn’t paint the full picture of just how much of an impact he has.

Specifically, you just have to look at the way he makes even the league’s best players nervous in one-on-one situations and how he uses his length and active hands to disrupt passing lanes. That doesn’t always lead to steals or even deflections, but it forces players to second guess themselves in the fear of not becoming the Great Barrier Thief’s next victim.

Plus, when it comes to the fact not all steals are created equal, you only have to go inside the mind of Daniels to see just how much thought goes into every time he swipes at the ball.

“He prefers to go right,” Daniels told foxsports.com.au earlier this year, breaking down one possession guarding Kyrie Irving in the second quarter of Atlanta’s 129-119 loss to Dallas.

“So, (I’m) shading him left a little bit, but knowing that the screen’s probably going to come on my left side. So I’m going to have to get into his right hip.

“It’s just about squaring him up, keeping him in front and then if I get the opportunity to get into his hip and put him on the back foot, then that’s what I want to do here.”

As for the argument against Daniels, Whitehead singled out the fact Atlanta’s defence has actually been worse with the Australian on the court.

On-off numbers can be a bit funky like that sometimes though, and it may have to do with the fact Daniels takes on the toughest defensive assignment every night and Quin Snyder often matches his minutes with the other team’s greatest threat.

In other words, when Daniels is off the court so is the opposing team’s best player and as a result it is hardly surprising that Atlanta’s defence is better.

The biggest argument against Daniels for DPOY, however, is the fact Atlanta is a middle-of-the-road defence and fringe playoff contender.

The last five DPOYs (Rudy Gobert, Jackson Jr., Smart, Rudy Gobert and Giannis Antetokounmpo) played for teams that finished either first, second or third in the regular season in their conference.

It is a similar story when it comes to defensive rating. Minnesota ranked first with Gobert, Memphis was third with Jackson Jr. as was Utah with Gobert while both Boston and Milwaukee was top of the league with Smart and Antetokounmpo.

Atlanta, on the other hand, has the 18th best defensive rating in the league.

Ultimately, as elite as Daniels may be as a perimeter defender, rim protection is considered the much more valuable skill in the NBA while the fact he isn’t the anchor of a top-five defence is also working against him.

Although six-time All-Defensive Team member Tony Allen threw his support behind Daniels’ DPOY case last month when speaking on FanDuel TV’s Run It Back show.

“(Draymond Green) my boy too, and he locks stuff up, he do (sic) a lot of stuff, he get everybody in the right place being on the back side of the defence, but I wouldn’t have him as my favourite,” Allen said.

“Man, my favourite is the guy from Atlanta… I like Dyson Daniels.

“I like how Dyson is all over the court, he’s in the passing lane, I (sic) been watching him too, when bigs get that ball on the mid-post and they turn they head, he sprint from that corner ripping those from behind.

“I like his game man, and he’s up for the challenge. I done seen (sic) him come down here in Memphis and get a key stop for a game winner with (Caris) Levert. I was actually at that game, I was like ‘Man this boy can really play defence.’

“But you know me, I’m always being favourable to guards.”

So, if Daniels isn’t expected to take home DPOY, who are the leading candidates?

Well, it was a three-way race between Daniels, Mobley and Jackson Jr. before the latter lost a few weeks to an ankle sprain, leaving Mobley and Green as the two betting favourites.

In the case of Mobley, you can build an easy DPOY case for him based on his ability to defend one through five along with the fact he is spearheading one of the league’s best defences.

Specifically, Whitehead pointed to the fact he is among the NBA leaders for blocks among strong defences but compared his field goal percentage numbers allowed on shots in the paint against some of the other DPOY contenders.

As for Green, his individual defence remains elite and has been for most of the season but it seems to be a case of Golden State’s recent team success putting more of a spotlight on him and shifting the narrative in his favour.

Although there is also something to be said about the fact Green has been campaigning for himself and literally changing the DPOY conversation.

Green won DPOY back in 2016-17 but arguably could have won at least one more award and so with that in mind, there is an element of wanting to right a wrong.

“I look around the league and don’t see many players impacting the game on the defensive end the way I do,” Green said after he shut down Antetokounmpo in a 104-93 win over the Bucks.

“I don’t see many players completely throwing off an entire team’s offense the way I do. One thousand percent.

“Especially with (Wembanyama) going down, (it) seemed like he had it won. And now it is right there. So one million percent I have a case, and I will continue to build that case for these next 13 games. Tonight was a prime example of that.”

Green clearly isn’t afraid to be the cheerleader for his own case, and he also has his own podcast to further push the conversation. But what kind of impact can that kind of self-promotion have?

Well, you only have to look at the shifting odds in the DPOY race over the last month.

Alex Speers said on The Athletic NBA Daily that the DPOY award “more than any other can be influenced by someone big in media”, even in this case if it seems to be Green himself.

“I think this is more about how weird this award is (and) how easily influenced this award is,” Speers said.

“I mean, we saw (in 2022) Seth Partnow made that tweet about Marcus Smart suggesting he may be a good (candidate).

“I hadn’t heard anyone big say anything Marcus Smart before that tweet and ever since that tweet it just started to build, it got momentum and all of a sudden Marcus Smart got Defensive Player of the Year.”

As for Jackson Jr., the injury seems to have halted his momentum while Lu Dort of Oklahoma City Thunder is the other obvious contender, but he looks likely to be a victim of his team’s overall success.

The Thunder’s defence has been historically strong this season, but they have a number of top-level defenders which makes it hard to truly appreciate Dort’s individual efforts, although you only have to look at his lockdown efforts on some of the league’s biggest names to understand why he deserves the honour.

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