The Stretch Run Primer: Minutes Managed (DPoY/RoY)

Hey, folks. This week, Gothic Ginobili's normal content is going to be put aside for a weeklong awards/storyline handicapping feature. For the first few days, we'll be going over each of the NBA's season-ending awards and handicapping the field, discussing the top players competing for the award and the dark horse candidates to keep your eye on. Along the way, I'll be writing meandering essays regarding various thoughts about the meaning of each award and the vagaries of sporting awards in a general sense. Fun stuff! Today we'll be touching on two awards, loosely connected by a single thread: the importance of playing minutes.

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DEFENSIVE PLAYER OF THE YEAR

Defensive Player of the Year is one of my favorite awards to think about, even if the winner doesn't always stand up to history. (See: Marcus Camby.) The concept is simple -- you find the player having the best defensive season in the league and you give the man his due. You watch the defensive end with a hawk's gaze and try to pick out the player who's acquitting himself best on the defensive end. Questions about this award are rarely questions about what the award represents -- rather, they're questions about the ways we measure defensive performance and heft. How do you measure the comparative value of different defensive roles? How good can a plus defender be on a bad defensive team, and how bad can a minus defender be on a good one? Where does the coach come into the picture? Et cetera. I can't give you definitive answers for any of those questions, but I can give you my view on the matter.

When it comes to the comparative defensive roles, my philosophy is simple -- bigger is better. The larger the player is, the more important their role on the defensive end. The amount of defensive responsibility allotted to point guards and small wings is significantly less than that allotted to large wings and forwards, which is in turn less than the responsibility that falls on the team's biggest bodies. In order to put together a dominant defensive possession, the big guys have to be constantly engaged. They need to stick to their man while shading the rim and setting bruising screens. They need to be sedentary but mobile, touchy but laid low. Conversely, a perimeter stopper has to spend the possession following their man (and keeping aware of the necessary switches), but generally lacks the responsibilities inherent in the screening/rim-protection/rebounding-dominance a good defensive big man has to do. Ergo, while I think perimeter stoppers play a valuable role in the NBA, I rarely think of perimeter stoppers as deserving of awards for being best-in-class. For a perimeter stopper to really be having the greatest defensive performance of the season, they'd need to be having one of the best defensive seasons for a wing of all time -- a big guy merely needs to be "really really good" to exert just as much influence on that end.

As for the good/bad team point, I think that's a key factor as well -- the NBA is a team game, and nowhere is that more obvious than on defense. But "team game" doesn't equate to equally proportioned roles -- a good defensive player tends to encapsulate the idea of a "system-in-a-box." When Dwight Howard was at his best, the general thought was that you could place four terrible defensive players around him and you'd still have a remarkably top-tier defense. That's always been my feeling of the general award, and it's one of the reasons I generally can't stand for the idea of good defensive players on bad defensive teams winning the award. It's not necessarily their fault that they aren't on a team with good defensive pieces, and if their performance is incredible enough they certainly aren't excluded from consideration. But a bad team defense has to reflect, in some way, on the bigs and the stoppers that roll out each and every game. And they lessen the candidacy of anyone unfortunate enough to be on a poor defensive team. (Inversely, I'll occasionally refocus the eye test if a player's team is good enough defensively -- sometimes you lose track of how good a player is under a deluge of numbers and statistics. But if a player's defensive team is top-5, someone is doing something right. And it's on the voters to figure out who that someone really is. ... Even if that's the coach.)

Given all that, there are three main players-to-watch for this year's award. (NOTE: The rankings come from a poll of ESPN Truehoop Network bloggers. They were given five main candidates. Average ranking is simply the average of all ranks 1-to-5 that player received. The number afterwards represents where that average ranking ranked among all players in the poll question.)

1. Joakim Noah -- Avg. Ranking: 2.0 (1)

2. Marc Gasol -- Avg. Ranking: 2.1 (2)

3. Tim Duncan -- Avg. Ranking: 3.2 (3)

Each of these players has a good case. For Noah, it's the sheer minutes total combined with Chicago's continued defensive dominance in the wake of Taj Gibson's generally disappointing year and the loss of Omer Asik. Noah is incredibly active on the defensive end, yelling out orders and getting the entire team communicating. He's about as nimble as a 7-foot behemoth can be, switching madly when he needs to and keeping offensive players on their toes as a general rule. He blocks shots, he blows up pick-and-rolls, he covers when his perimeter backup loses their man. He's a beast. Result-wise, the Bulls are the fourth best defense in the league despite losing key members of their defensive core. Noah's at the heart of everything they do on the defensive end and he's taken on a larger role as needed.

On the other hand, it's hard to look past Marc Gasol. While Gasol doesn't have quite the rebounding chops of a Duncan or a Noah, the general identity of the Memphis Grizzlies lives and dies with Gasol's contributions. The bruising style that's made Memphis famous comes straight from Gasol's long arms, with Gasol notorious for his ability to dart around the rim and body up anyone who tries to get a shot. Early this year, the Grizzlies absolutely obliterated the Heat -- and it wasn't a fluke! When they're rolling, the Grizzlies shut down the other team's at rim game like no other. They force teams to pull back around 3-4 feet out using Gasol's enormity and heft as a deterrent. As with Noah, Gasol's an active communicator -- he barks out orders and points his teammates around with the best of them. It helps that the Grizzlies are the 2nd best defensive team in the league, and that the Grizzlies might be first if they didn't play so many more games in the offensively absurd Western conference

Our third candidate's case is a combination of factors. The first is obvious -- Tim Duncan is quite frankly having one of the best defensive seasons of his career, a renaissance year where his mobility has returned in full form. He's destroying pick and rolls with the vigor of a younger man, and his aptly chanced weakside swats have gotten increasingly well-timed as he's aged. Traditionally, Duncan has struggled mightily to defend athletic big men and keep them in check. While he's had his occasional trouble with DeAndre Jordan and Serge Ibaka, he's mostly reversed that trend this year -- very few big men have "gotten under his skin" so to speak, and the ones that have aren't just "any athletic big whatsoever." Kawhi Leonard and Tim Duncan have led the Spurs into a defensive renaissance; for the first time in 4 years, San Antonio's defense is markedly better than their offense. They're not a title contender for their blistering offensive pace, they're a title contender because they completely shut teams down. More than anyone else, that's on Duncan.

Picking a defensive player of the year out of these three is actually rather difficult. You can boil their cases down to a simple choice of preference. Duncan is the low-minute (1481 minutes played -- 29.6 per game), max-efficiency (the man barely ever takes off a play in the scant minutes he gets on the floor), mid-results (3rd best team defense) candidate. Gasol is the mid-minute (1899 minutes played -- 34.5 per game), mid-efficiency (occasional slacking, mostly locked in), max-results (2nd best team defense) candidate. Noah is the max-minute (1987 minutes played -- 38.2 per game), low-efficiency (almost every Bulls game there seems to be a lull around the time Noah plays his 25-30th minutes, before he reaches his second wind, where he's sucking air and playing it easy on the defensive end), mid-results (4th best team defense) candidate. How you rank them depends entirely on how you rank those individual barometers of defensive success. If you most value a defender who's giving you rock-solid defensive productivity in an insane amount of minutes, Noah's your guy. If you most value the best defensive season for one of the best defensive players of all time in generally minimal minutes, Duncan's your guy. If you straddle the fence and believe the conference matters (as many do), Gasol's your guy. None of them are strictly wrong choices -- they're simply different. They're all having absolutely excellent defensive seasons and nobody should be particularly nettled if any of them win it.

Me? I'd probably vote Duncan. I think Noah pulls it out in the end, though.

DARK HORSE PICKS: For each of these awards sections, I'll also be going over in brief the year's top dark horse candidates for each award, along with a quick blurb on each stating their case and their problems. Three sentences apiece. THREE! THAT'S IT! In this case, most of the dark horses has a reasonable path available to win the award, even if many are quite flawed and stand on significantly less merit than the above players. Our three dark horse picks are...

• ROY HIBBERT: Most people wouldn't have him in contention for the award, and that's a mistake -- this is a defensive award, and his offense really SHOULDN'T come into play. Hibbert's the essential old-school center at the core of Vogel's grind-it-out defensive system, and his shot blocking/heft is integral to what the Pacers do. On the other hand, his offense is so startlingly bad he'll have trouble getting votes for any award, and he's been helped significantly this season by West and George both having banner years defensively.

• KEVIN GARNETT: Without him, Boston would've been a well-below 0.500 team for the past 2-3 years, and he's doing the same stuff he always does this year -- furious screaming, insane switching, and the dirty screens fans of the opposing team know and loathe. On the other hand, the Celtics started the year off poorly on the defensive end, and a lot of that fell on Garnett -- he's getting old and it's starting to really show. Garnett should've won the award last year, and if the Celtics recover and end up as the NBA's best defense, I imagine he'll win it this year.

• ANDRE IGUODALA: As expected, Iguodala has been Denver's only particularly competent defensive player. The schemes haven't worked quite as well as Karl would've liked, but Iguodala's dominance of the opposing team's perimeter game has taken the Denver defense about as far as it can possibly take it. That's probably not far enough -- nobody really fears the Nuggets defensively, and regardless of Iguodala's heft, their swiss-cheese interior defense puts a hard ceiling on the Nuggets' defensive acumen that sits decidedly around "average."

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ROOKIE OF THE YEAR

Unlike DPoY, Rookie of the Year tends to be pretty straightforward. Very few of the RoY races we've watched in the last decade have been competitive whatsoever heading into the season's stretch run; a full six of those ten races could be most effectively described as coronations (Kyrie, Griffin, Rose, Durant, Paul, Roy) and a further two were won by a large enough margin to make the proceedings elementary (Tyreke, LeBron). It doesn't tend to be hotly contested after the all-star break. If you ask most people, the pattern's stuck for this season -- Lillard is headed for a wide margin victory with little left to watch for. I entreat you to look a bit closer, though -- there IS a race here, much like for Defensive Player of the Year. It just takes a bit of reorientation and a bit of statistical chicanery.

Our two candidates are...

1. Damian Lillard

2. Anthony Davis

Okay, yeah. That was pretty obvious. I probably didn't need to state the two. But, indeed, the mere fact that there are two is a testament to the quality of the two players. Lillard's case almost doesn't bear repeating -- Lillard stepped in as one of Portland's first options from his first day on the job and didn't skip a beat, showing the kind of savvy domination that befits a much older man. Most rookies spend a season or two adapting to the NBA speed, especially from the point guard position -- there was no such adjustment period for Lillard, who was faking out and completely outsmarting NBA defenders from the second he stepped on the court. He's been indispensable for the Blazers from day 1, and while they're (somewhat predictably) fading from the playoff picture as their schedule catches up to them, Lillard has remained relatively solid despite lacking a backup and being quite a bit more scouted than he used to be. Every single rookie that's averaged his stats has been named Rookie of the Year. He's been very impressive.

All that said, Davis isn't completely out of the running yet. In fact, a few odd ducks would place him as the better rookie on the basis of his efficiency. And that's not an inconsequential argument. For all of Lillard's flash, he's still shooting 41% from the field and 34% from three despite jacking up six threes a night. That's... not ideal, even if the Blazers lack many other good options from behind the arc. Lillard has a very high usage rate for a point guard and doesn't quite have the efficiency to warrant it -- Davis, on the other hand, has been quietly phenomenal for a better-than-their-record Hornets team. Defensively, he's been incredible -- a maelstrom shot-blocking force that can't be stopped by conventional means. As he's gotten more muscular and NBA-fit, he's improved his one-on-one defense and clearly ranks as one of the best rookie big-man defenders I've had the pleasure of following. He's no slouch offensively, either -- he's converting on 51% of his shots from the field, with a nice baby hook, a solid floater, and a fundamentally sound jump shot. He's averaging 13-8 in 28 minutes a night, which translates to 16-10 per 36 minutes. Combine that with his incredible defense and Lillard's abysmal defense, and you start to wonder why exactly Lillard's conventionally seen to be winning the award by such a large margin.

And then you come across the reason -- as with Duncan, there's a single statistical category that separates Davis from the winner-in-waiting: minutes. While Davis has missed several games to injury with a concussion and other small maladies, Lillard has stayed firmly on the court in the face of an insane minutes load and accumulated ridiculous statistics to go with that. He's one of just 26 players in the history of the NBA to play 38 minutes per game as a rookie, and most of them either won the award outright or put up a strong challenge for it against a ringer of a candidate (Gasol, Rose, Walter Davis, et cetera). When you accumulate so many minutes that your on/off numbers become virtually irrelevant due to small sample size, you know you're playing a lot. As a rookie, one of the most impressive accomplishments you can muster is the ability to play large minutes -- most coaches resist playing rookies through mistakes and follies. Lillard sidestepped that by simply eradicating mistakes and follies from his game -- Davis still makes the occasional blunder that causes Monty Williams to yank him early, and he's still extremely raw. He's productive, but he's raw -- and at some point, simply being able to count on Lillard for an extra 10-12 minutes of rookie star-level performance does actually come into play.

All that said, while I think Lillard is going to win the award (and win it relatively handily, provided he doesn't completely melt down in these last two months)... as with my picking Duncan above, I can't completely overlook what Anthony Davis is doing for the artists formerly known as Hornets. He hasn't played as many minutes due both to injury and Monty Williams playing it safe and keeping their future star fresh, yes. But you can't completely eliminate him based on that alone -- Davis has been markedly more efficient when he's seen the floor than Lillard has, and he looks like he's got quite a ways to grow. I don't know if anyone outside of Portland believes that Lillard is going to be the better player of the two in 2 or 3 years. All that said? I'd probably STILL vote Lillard, simply because I love what he's done and I love what I've seen from him. As we enter the season's stretch run, I'd take as much time as you can to turn an eye to these two -- the race is closer than you think, and both are scintillating to watch and enjoy.

DARK HORSE PICKS: For each of these awards sections, I'll also be going over in brief the year's top dark horse candidates for each award, along with a quick blurb on each stating their case and their problems. Three sentences apiece. THREE! THAT'S IT! In this case, there's really no way -- barring catastrophe -- that any other candidate will make a strong run for the award. Here's 2013's single dark horse candidate.

• ANDRE DRUMMOND: Who else? Mini-Shaq represented the bourgeois's best shot at a competitive race -- when he went down with a back fracture, that essentially ended his candidacy. He's been arguably the most efficient of all this year's rookies, and he may end up the best player; the award's for a season of action, though, and the injury makes it unlikely he'll see enough time to garner more than 1 or 2 token votes.

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Hope you enjoyed this first installment. We'll continue tomorrow, handicapping more awards. See you then!