First Quarter Awards for the 2024-25 NBA Season

MVP, (I)DPOQ, (P)DPOQ, COQ, 6MOQ, MIP, ROQ, and UTOQ. Read on to find out what those acronyms mean!

It’s hard to believe, but we’re already at the quarter-mark of the season. We’re at the point where many of the early-season statistical mirages have started to either fade or solidify. Nothing is set in stone, of course, but a 20-ish game sample is a significant chunk of the season.

I love writing quarterly awards for a few reasons. It lets me write about players (and coaches) I might not have time to get to otherwise, and it provides a great pulse check at the end of the season when I’m thinking about my year-end awards.

Plus, readers seem to enjoy this column! I’d love to hear from you in the comments about how monumentally correct I am in all choices this quarter. One important note: as a guideline, players must not have missed much time, or they’re disqualified. A quarter is only 20 games or so; there’s not a lot of margin here.

(Numbers and stats as of 12/2/24.)

Perimeter Defensive Player of the Quarter

Dyson Daniels, Atlanta Hawks

A preamble: Big men, inherently, are just more valuable on defense than perimeter players. Offenses can screen off even the best wing and guard defenders or flow away from the player the defender is guarding. By virtue of their station, bigs are involved in many more actions and can make a correspondingly more significant impact.

However, that doesn’t mean that perimeter defense doesn’t matter or doesn’t deserve to be recognized, so I have traditionally split my quarterly awards to recognize both an interior and a perimeter defensive player. Adam Silver, take note.

More than any other category, perimeter defense is something that the math hasn’t quite figured out how to explain. You can look at all-in-one numbers to get a good sense of overall impact. However, you can’t break perimeter defense into its component parts the way you can with interior defense. It’s hard to accurately assign usable numbers to things like screen navigation and ball pressure, much less grade players on how accurately they funneled ballhandlers in the right direction.

So, as much as it goes against type to venture out from my numbers-driven sandbar and swim with the sharks in the eye-test ocean, I have to do it. And since I’ve already started with a nautical metaphor, I may as well pick the Great Barrier Thief, Dyson Daniels.

Gun to my head, I would pick Amen Thompson or Kris Dunn as the best perimeter defenders in the league. Derrick White is having yet another insane year, and Thompson’s teammate, Tari Eason, deserves love. Jalen Suggs is the nastiest dude around. My pick for last season’s first-quarter winner, OG Anunoby, has been fantastic, too. There are a lot of deserving options, including many I didn’t name. Some of them earn higher marks than Daniels in advanced all-in-one metrics.

But Daniels has had the most defensive responsibility of that group, and he has flourished under the Atlasian burden of carrying the Hawks defense. Bball-Index rates him as having the toughest covers of anyone, and Daniels has graded out as a better star-stopper than anyone even approaching his difficulty level. Other top-tier defenders have peers they can share the burden with (think Thompson and Eason, or White and Jrue Holiday); maybe it’s unfair to judge players this way, but it often feels like Daniels is Atlanta’s Hodor — the one defender holding back obliteration.

If you prefer simpler metrics, leading the league in steals and deflections (the latter of which will set a record if it even remotely holds) is a nice seagull feather in Dyson’s jaunty cap.

Daniels fights through picks as well as anyone. Even when a screener does hit him, he uses those reacher-grabber arms to poke the ball from behind:

Again, this is the award we have the least statistical ammo to arm ourselves with, and therefore, it’s the one most in the beholder’s eye. It feels sort of basic to pick Daniels, and I yearn to be a hoopster, to be contrarian in a cool way, by picking Thompson or Dunn. Alas, perhaps next quarter.

If games played didn’t matter, my pick would’ve been Alex Caruso. When healthy, the Thunder led the league with a defensive rating that looked like it came from the 1990s. Caruso’s man-on-fire point-of-attack defense was a big part of it (and to be clear, he’s the one setting men on fire). But he’s only played 13 games this season; that disqualifies him by my previously established, already regretted criteria.

Interior Defensive Player of the Quarter

Victor Wembanyama, San Antonio Spurs

A very small contingent of NBA fans out there seem determined to dismantle the Wembanyama hype brick by brick. They point out the times he watches a ballhandler streak by for a layup, clip all the easily-intercepted pocket passes that slide right under his arms, laugh when he stands around waiting for a rebound that never comes.

And you know what? Those are all real flaws, but there has never been a more straightforward case of missing the forest for the trees. Wembanyama is already a generational defender despite those mistakes; how good will he be in five years, when he’s finally old enough to rent an American car?

I could throw a billion numbers at you proving the case for Wembanyama as interior defender of the quarter, but if you’ve been reading my work for a while, you’ve seen them all before. Oh look, players are shooting just 43% at the rim against him; he’s leading the league in blocks by a billion while averaging more steals than Jrue Holiday, Anthony Edwards, or Jimmy Butler; he’s in the top couple of names on every advanced metric leaderboard.

For all Wembanyama’s flubs, and there are plenty, there are so many more highlights. He covers ground in ways that don’t quite adhere to physics:

He’s the deserving winner.

One guy who might have something to say about future quarters is Chet Holmgren, one of the few players to match Wembanyama’s impact metrics. He’s dinged here because he’s only played in half of OKC’s games, but he started the season with even more ferocity than he showed as a rookie. I love watching the beanpole defend.

Finally, Rudy Gobert’s numbers are better than the eye test this season. Gobert was my pick for DPOY last year (and won the less prestigious actual trophy), and by the stats, he’s been nearly as good this year. But perhaps the general malaise around the Wolves is seeping into my brain, because it just doesn’t feel like he’s been as consistently dominant as last season.

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Sixth Man of the Quarter

Amen Thompson, Houston Rockets

I entered this exercise thinking the Sixth Man would be Payton Pritchard, Buddy Hield, or, perhaps, advanced stats darling Ty Jerome.

All those players are perfectly deserving choices. Pritchard has been one of the most prolific and accurate gunners in the league, sprinting around the court looking for any tiny sliver of daylight in which to launch threes. He was at his best last Friday when he dropped 19 points in the fourth quarter to help Boston pull away from a surprisingly feisty Bulls team and keep their NBA Cup hopes alive.

Hield has a similar case, hitting a career-best 44% from deep on nearly eight attempts per game while making fans forget about Klay Thompson. Although it’s not saying much, he’s also having the best defensive season of his career.

Jerome, preposterously, is trying to hit a 50/50/90 season: he’s up to 58% from the field, 52% from deep (on 3.2 attempts in 20 minutes per game!), and 88% from the charity stripe. He’s also in the 99th percentile for steal rate (although he gambles a bit too much for my liking) and is eighth in the league in season EPM! I doubt Jerome can maintain this production level all season long, but he’s become a valuable and dangerous weapon for Cleveland off the bench.

But I’m going with Thompson, who has dramatically improved on both sides of the ball to become one of Houston’s most important players despite still not having a three-pointer. Who could have seen this coming?

Putting the snide self-congratulations aside for a moment, though, Thompson has a strong case. He can’t do as much from distance as his competitors, but he’s lapped them (and the rest of the league) defensively anyway. And while there are statistical arguments in favor of the others, one thing that weighs heavy with me is that Thompson is closing important games.

On a Rockets team overflowing with young talent, despite his shooting deficiencies, Thompson is often on the court when it matters most. Pritchard and Jerome have closed competitive games, too, but far less frequently.

Where Jerome and Pritchard have swung games with offensive explosions, Thompson does it by locking down opposing ballhandlers for game-saving steals and fast breaks.

Here is a swipe-and-score with three minutes left in a game Houston was losing by two:

Another another pilfer-to-points tying the game at the end of regulation, a game Houston won in OT:

Another steal, up three with fewer than two minutes, this one on Luka Doncic:

There are more, somehow, but I’ve made my point.

Thompson’s managed to make himself an asset on offense, too, through a mix of savvy cutting, secondary playmaking, and offensive rebounding. It’s verrrrry interesting to me that lineups with Thompson and Alperen Sengun are in the 99th percentile in net rating after being abysmal last year.

Let’s be clear: I picked Pritchard to win Sixth Man of the Year in the preseason before it was cool, and it wasn’t pandering to the audience. His path to the trophy is legitimate; he’s now the favorite to win for a reason. It’s unlikely Thompson can keep up the late-game defensive heroics all season long simply because those events are typically so few and far between. But again, this isn’t a forward-looking prediction; it’s an award on what’s happened in real life.

There are plenty of other strong reserves with cases, too, like Memphis’ Scotty Pippen, Thompson’s teammate Tari Eason, Malik Monk (playing well, but missed too much time for consideration for a quarterly award), Naz Reid, and many more. But for the first quarter, at least, Thompson reigns supreme.

Most Valuable Player of the Quarter