One NBA player appears to have gotten a first-place DPOY vote based off reputation alone.
Cleveland Cavaliers big man Evan Mobley was officially named the 2024-25 NBA Defensive Player of the Year on Thursday. Mobley, who anchored the defense of the 64-win Cavs, received 35 first-place votes and 30 second-place votes to win the award fairly comfortably.
But there was at least one shocker in the voting results. Namely, Milwaukee Bucks star Giannis Antetokounmpo received a first-place vote for DPOY (and no other votes besides that one).
You can see the full results at the link here.
The former NBA MVP Antetokounmpo is an ex-Defensive Player of the Year winner himself, taking home the award in 2020 and earning five All-Defensive Team nods over the course of his career. But Antetokounmpo has not gotten an All-Defensive accolade since the 2021-22 as his defense has not been elite for a few years now.
Antetokounmpo posted the second-worst defensive rating of his career this season (111.7), and he is no longer even the anchor of Milwaukee’s defense (in which Brook Lopez mans the back line and Ryan Rollins or Taurean Prince spearheads the point of attack). Overall this year, the Bucks also finished a medicore 12th in defensive efficiency, per ESPN.
Now in danger of another first-round exit after going down 0-2 to the Indiana Pacers in the Bucks’ playoff series, Antetokounmpo is frustrated and has been dropping F-bombs in his postgame press conferences. Thus, his first-place DPOY vote this year probably doesn’t mean all that much to him.
