For all intents and purposes, the NBA’s Defensive Player of the Year race was supposed to be over before the season even started. But while Victor Wembanyama certainly lived up to his billing as the league’s best defensive player during his second season with the San Antonio Spurs, his season-ending shoulder injury threw a wrench in those plans.
With Wembanyama no longer eligible to win the award, the 2025 DPOY race effectively began in late-February, with Cleveland Cavaliers big man Evan Mobley quickly emerging as the apparent frontrunner. According to Sports Betting Dime’s tracker, the fourth-year forward/center was a -207 favorite to win the Defensive Player of the Year on March 5 and a -298 favorite on March 15.
Those odds don’t mean Mobley was a lock to win the award, but considering there was only a month remaining in the regular season, it stood to reason that it would take either an injury or a significant drop off in his play for him not to win it. And yet, despite the 23-year-old remaining healthy and plenty productive, he found himself trailing Draymond Green a mere 11 days later, with the Golden State Warriors forward’s odds currently sitting at -200 according to DraftKings.
So what happened?
As many in the media have pointed out, the surge in Green’s DPOY odds coincided with public comments that he made in mid-March actively campaigning for the award. Calling out an East Coast bias in the voting, the 35-year-old stated his case before later telling ESPN’s Malika Andrews that this would likely be his “last best chance” to win the award that he also took home in 2017.
Give Green this much: the part-time (and polarizing) media member has clearly learned a thing or two about narrative building over the years. While Mobley was (and still is) a worthy candidate, his resume isn’t strong enough for voters to immediately reject the romanticism of Green getting the award one last time in the latter stages of his career.
Whether Green’s narrative-building will be effective enough for him to become a two-time Defensive Player of the Year remains to be seen, but Mobley isn’t going down without a fight. Or perhaps more accurately, Darius Garland isn’t going down without a fight, with the Cavs’ All-Star point guard going to bat for his soft-spoken teammate following Cleveland’s No. 1 seed-clinching win over the Chicago Bulls on Monday night.
“He doesn’t hack. He doesn’t scream at the refs. He goes and blocks shots. His deflection numbers [are] out the roof,” Garland told reporters with Mobley by his side. “He guards 1-5. I mean, what doesn’t he do? He just doesn’t express it how other people express it. So if you look at the numbers, if you watch the Cavs games, you see all the impact that he does for us on both sides of the ball, not just on defense.”
It’s likely not a coincidence that Garland appeared to be talking just as much about Green as he was Mobley.
“That’s just a little bit of my case,” he continued. “I can go on Twitter or go on podcasts, and do the same thing for my boy. But, I’m gonna let him talk his talk whenever he wants to.”
While many awards — across all sports — seem to be determined more by advanced analytics than actual voter input these days, there’s almost something refreshing about Green and Mobley (via Garland) engaging in media campaigns to make their cases. And ultimately, each player’s public stance appears to have impacted the odds, which could in turn affect voters eager to follow suit.
We’ll find out who ran the better campaign in the weeks ahead, with Oklahoma City Thunder swingman Lu Dort still hanging around as a third-party candidate. All things considered, the fight to be named DPOY has emerged as one of the league’s most intriguing awards races, especially when considering that this was an award that was supposed to belong to Wembanyama for the foreseeable future.