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Evan Mobley Named 2024–25 NBA Defensive Player of the Year
The NBA announced that Cleveland Cavaliers power forward Evan Mobley has won the league's 2024-25 Kia Defensive Player of the Year award.
Mobley, who is in his fourth season in the pros, is having a career year as the Cavs are currently playing in the postseason as the Eastern Conference's No. 1 seed. The league's award voters widely agreed that Mobley's defensive prowess was the best of any player in the NBA, with him garnering 35 of the 100 possible first-place votes, 10 more than runner-up Dyson Daniels. In terms of points, which combines first-, second-, and third-place votes, Mobley had 285, Daniels 197.
There was some smoke about Draymond Green, who won the award in 2017, being a possible candidate for the award, but his campaign started later in the season after opinions had largely been shaped. Green gained 15 first-place votes and 154 overall points in the voting.
Mobley became the first Cleveland Cavaliers player esteemed with the honor.
Here's how the voting for the top-three shook out:
Player | First-place Votes | Second-place Votes | Third-Place Votes | Points |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Evan Mobley | 35 | 30 | 20 | 285 |
Dyson Daniels | 25 | 17 | 21 | 197 |
Draymond Green | 15 | 20 | 19 | 154 |
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Josh Wilson is the news director of the Breaking and Trending News team at Sports Illustrated. Before joining SI in 2024, he worked for FanSided in a variety of roles, most recently as senior managing editor of the brand’s flagship site. He has also served as a general manager of Sportscasting, the sports arm of a start-up sports media company, where he oversaw the site’s editorial and business strategy. Wilson has a bachelor’s degree in mass communications from SUNY Cortland and a master’s in accountancy from the Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois. He loves a good nonfiction book and enjoys learning and practicing Polish. Wilson lives in Chicago but was raised in upstate New York. He spent most of his life in the Northeast and briefly lived in Poland, where he ate an unhealthy amount of pastries for six months.