There’s nothing wrong with the film Shakespeare In Love. It’s good, maybe even really good. But is it historically good? And did it deserve to beat out Saving Private Ryan for Best Picture at the Oscars? No and hell no.
This is how I’ve come to think about the race between two Frenchmen, Rudy Gobert and Victor Wembanyama, for NBA Defensive Player of the Year. Granted, Gobert, who’s won the same award three times, may just be historically good, but Wembanyama has been rewriting history in real time all season.
Gobert anchors the league’s stoutest defense (in of points per game) on a team that was, heading into Thursday night’s action, the best in the Western Conference. Meanwhile, Wembanyama anchors the conference’s second-worst defense on its worst team. Those facts, coupled with a sense that Gobert’s been shortchanged a time or two in the years he hasn’t won DPOY, have made the “Stifle Tower” a prohibitive favorite — ranging from -1800 at FanDuel — to win the award for a fourth time.
Gobert’s defensive counting stats are also exceptional, as he averages 2.1 blocks and 0.6 steals per game. But they pale in comparison to those of the 7’4” Wembanyama, who’s averaging an NBA-best 3.5 blocks per game to go with 1.3 steals, which puts him inside the league’s top 20.
Wembanyama, who can be grabbed at anywhere from 11/1 at FanDuel to 6/1 at Caesars, isn’t just running up numbers against crummy teams on the defensive end. On Tuesday, in a hard-fought loss to the defending champion Denver Nuggets, he mustered nine blocks — and that wasn’t even his high for the season (that would be 10 against Detroit in January).
His 210 pounds of sinew consistently swallowed up the far beefier Nikola Jokic in the paint — something nobody in the league does to the Joker with any regularity — and the fact that Wembanyama had one foot in the paint was enough to get Christian Braun to up would would have been a go-ahead dunk in the closing seconds and kick out to Michael Porter Jr. for what wound up being a game-clinching three.
Is ‘Boyhood’ better? 4z4d34
Unlike Gobert, who’s a highly exploitable perimeter defender, there have been times when Wembanyama has looked as though he’s been guarding all five opponents at once — and doing a darn good job of it.
Sure, Wembanyama can look a little awkward when guarding players a foot shorter than him 30 feet from the basket, but that could be because even the wiliest basketball observers have simply never witnessed an athlete of his size, shape, and dexterity.
If the NBA were to settle this award in the fairest way possible, it would simply pose this question to its players: Who’s the one guy you don’t want to see within 10 feet of you when you’re in position to score or make a key on offense? I’m guessing the answer would be Wembanyama, and I’m guessing the vote would be somewhere in the vicinity of anonymous.
Maybe the Shakespeare-Private Ryan analogy isn’t the right cinematic parallel to draw when describing this year’s DPOY race. Perhaps Birdman over Boyhood is better.
While it had its critics, Birdman was a great movie that broke several creative boundaries. But Boyhood, which was filmed over a 12-year period with the same actors, was like nothing anyone had ever seen before — and Oscar voters, regrettably, didn’t see fit to honor it properly
That’s Wembanyama, and the decision not to acknowledge his code-obliterating magnificence right out of the chute would be a grave mistake.
