NBA Defensive Player of the Year (DPOY) Shares
When it comes to evaluating achievement, it is really easy to get fixated on the number of awards a player has received. In the NBA, getting voted in as the regular season MVP (Most Valuable Player) or DPOY (Defensive Player of the Year) can really cement a player’s legacy. However, the catch is that only one player can be awarded the MVP or DPOY at the end of each season, and more often than not, there are many deserving candidates.
Since the 1980–81 NBA season, the MVP award has been decided by a panel of select sportswriters and broadcasters throughout the United States and Canada. Each member of the voting panel casts a vote for five players ranked from one to five. From each individual ballot, the first-place candidate receives 10 points, second-place, seven, third-place, five, fourth-place, three, and fifth-place, one. Since 2010, fans have gotten to cast one ballot through online voting. The player with the highest point total wins the MVP award.
The DPOY award is decided similarly. The first year that the DPOY was awarded in the NBA was 1983 (end-of-season award for the 1982–83 season). Today, sportswriters and broadcasters are selected to vote for the DPOY, ranking three individuals from first to third, with the first-place candidate getting five points, second-place, three, and third-place, one.
Award Shares
Although only one name can be attached to an award, there is a way to credit other players for receiving votes for MVP and DPOY. This is called the award share. Below, I have presented data from basketball-reference.com illustrating how the MVP and DPOY award shares are assigned.
The 2015–16 NBA MVP was historic because it was the first time that a player was unanimously voted for as the MVP of the league. This year, Stephen Curry received all 131 first-place votes, meaning he got the maximum number of votes that a player could receive that year as denoted in the “Pts Max” column. Since Stephen Curry received 1310 points in the voting and the maximum was 1310, his share of the maximum was 1310/1310, which equals 1. Looking at the next highest vote-getter, Kawhi Leonard, we can see that his share was 0.484, since 634/1310 = 0.484. As seen below, the DPOY award shares are also calculated in the same way.
After calculating MVP and DPOY shares for each individual season, we can add up the award shares over all the seasons of a player’s career. Looking at cumulative award shares is useful because it gives a gauge of how many awards a player has won relative to the number of award shares he or she received. Below is a list of the top 10 leaders for cumulative MVP shares in NBA history.
Some interesting narratives emerge after looking at this list. For example, LeBron James, who has accumulated the most MVP Shares in NBA history, has won the MVP award four times. Michael Jordan, who is just behind him, has won five times. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who is more than two full MVP shares behind either LeBron or Jordan, has actually won the award six times. Knowing this, one could easily argue that LeBron deserves more MVP awards than Jordan, who deserves more MVP awards than Kareem.
DPOY Shares Results
I found the list of NBA MVP shares on basketball-reference.com, but after searching all over, I wasn’t able to find a similar sort of cumulative list for DPOY shares, so I decided to create my own! Using Python, I scraped basketball-reference.com for DPOY voting information and other statistics. I decided to include some other columns that would help to contextualize the DPOY share numbers. Below is a list of the top 25 players in terms of career DPOY shares.
Here is a brief explanation of each of the columns:
- Seasons: The total number of NBA regular seasons a player has played in.
- Games: The total number of regular-season games a player has been in.
- Minutes: The total number of regular-season minutes a player has played.
- DWS: “Defensive Win Shares.” An advanced, cumulative defense statistic.
- Seasons_>50: The number of seasons in which a player has played in more than 50% of his team’s games that season. If a player switched teams in the middle of the season, it is just 50% of the maximum number of games that any team has played that season. In the modern era, NBA teams will usually play 82 games in a season, so in that case, my script counts the season if the player took the court in 41 or more games. However, as we have seen in recent seasons because of unforeseen circumstances, that number can differ from 82.
- Seasons_>75: The same idea as Seasons_>50 except the cutoff is 75% of games.
- Seasons_DPOY: The number of seasons a player has played in which the DPOY was awarded. For example, if a player was active in the 1980–81 NBA season, it wouldn’t count in this column because the first year the DPOY was awarded was the 1982–83 season. For players who played their entire NBA careers post the 1982–83 season, this value in this column will be equal to that in Seasons.
- Seasons_>50_DPOY: This is probably one of the most important columns. This is the number of seasons in which a player played more than 50% of his team’s games and in which the DPOY was awarded. This is important to take note of because players who miss a lot of games during the regular season are less likely to receive regular season awards. In order to be in consideration for the DPOY after missing more than half the regular season, a player would probably have to have the best defensive season of all time. For players who played their entire NBA careers post the 1982–83 season, this value in this column will be equal to that in Seasons_>50.
- Seasons_>75_DPOY: The same idea as Seasons_>50_DPOY except the cutoff is 75% of games. A player is a lot more likely to be considered for DPOY if he or she has had a stellar defensive season and has played in a majority of the team’s games that season. Again, for players who played their entire NBA careers post the 1982–83 season, this value in this column will be equal to that in Seasons_>75.
- DPOY_awards: The number of DPOY awards a player has won in his career.
- DPOY_shares: The cumulative number of DPOY shares.
- DPOY_diff: The difference between the number of DPOY shares a player has received and the number of DPOY awards he or she has won.
Looking at the results, there are some very interesting findings. Sidney Moncrief, who won both the first and second ever DPOY awards, is only 25th on the list of DPOY_shares (although he did play for three seasons before the DPOY was ever awarded). However, there are players that have never won the award who have received plenty of DPOY votes year after year (e.g. Bruce Bowen, Tim Duncan, Anthony Davis). Let’s take a look at the list of the top 25 players in terms of the difference between the DPOY shares they received vs. the number of times they were awarded as the DPOY.
Now, going the other way, we’ll look at players who were awarded maybe a little too much based on the numbers. I’m not saying that they weren’t deserving of the award in the year(s) they got it, but rather that they either were part of a close race in the years they won, or only had a few really good defensive seasons. For example, in the 2014–15 NBA season, there was a lot of debate over who should be the DPOY. The race mostly came down to two players, Kawhi Leonard and Draymond Green (DeAndre Jordan was kind of in the mix as well). Kawhi ended up winning it with a share of 0.516, but Draymond got a share of 0.491 (DeAndre Jordan got 0.405). To put this in perspective, Draymond only lost by 16 points (333 vs. 317)! If he had just received a few more votes, he would have won the award and Kawhi would be on the list above rather than the one below.
Conclusion
One caveat is that on basketball-reference.com, it seems like some DPOY voting is data is missing. For example, for the 1982–83 season, there are only six players listed in the DPOY voting table, but adding all the votes of these six players doesn’t yield the maximum number of points. However, since data is available for the main vote-getters in these years and since there are only two or three seasons in which data is missing, it is likely that the missing data will not have much of an effect on the final results.
This is obviously a very rudimentary analysis, but I think that many interesting insights can be gleaned from these numbers, especially when taking stats like Seasons_>75_DPOY and DWS into account. One thing that really stands out is the fact that at the all-time leaders in MVP shares have almost double the number of award shares as the all-time leaders in DPOY shares. This shows that it is really difficult to be an elite defensive player for a long time. Even defensive specialists, such as Ben Wallace, only had a handful of truly great defensive seasons. However, someone like LeBron James has sustained his MVP-level of play throughout his many years in the league (even though his defensive effort diminished over time), and therefore he has continued to earn MVP shares. Although some of the best defensive players of all time are missing (Bill Russell probably would have been first on this list by a mile) because the DPOY wasn’t awarded during their time in the league, this stat still gives us a good picture of some of the best defensive players.
This sort of analysis can be done for any sports league in which awards are decided by voting (e.g. baseball-reference.com keeps track of the MLB award shares for the MVP and the Cy Young Award). I really wanted to generate MVP share numbers for the WNBA, but I wasn’t able to find MVP voting data for the earlier years of the WNBA’s existence (even though I came across this article).
For the full list of DPOY shares, visit my GitHub repository. Along with the Jupyter Notebook that contains the code that put together this table, I also started to create a Python module with functions that help to scrape data and put together basketball statistics.
Hope you found this interesting, and always remember that defense wins championships!
