Getting baked by KD and then recovering to block his shot is quintessential Rudy Gobert. I love the Derrick White clip as well; it was included in my propaganda piece for him. If you key in on him for an entire game, the number of times he does something that no other guard defender can do on defense is baffling. He's no Ausar or Amen athletically, but he causes the same amount of chaos, and I love it.
Ugh, I was hoping no one would bring him up ha, I don’t have a super satisfactory answer for you. I literally just wrote about how impactful he’s been for LA, but the numbers have never quite matched the eye test for me.
He’s got a strong statistical argument and he’s doing a lot of things sort of like Derrick White (albeit in different ways). No problem if you want to slide him onto 3rd team. There are a lot of really good defenders in the league, and I just couldn’t quite put him above the rest of the guys on the list. This is just a judgement call, and it might not be a good one.
He deserved to be in my honorable mentions, tho. I’ll fix that.
I don’t know if you saw Nekias Duncan’s list on Yahoo, but he had almost the exact same blurb about Marcus Smart. Basically said he thought Smart was having a fine season until he saw the crazy stats and then felt obligated to include him ha. More or less my story but I’m (perhaps wrongly) sticking to my convictions here ha
Would love to see Neemias on a team, but I respect your choices
He's great and has some interesting statistical cases! It's just tough competition at the top this year.
Getting baked by KD and then recovering to block his shot is quintessential Rudy Gobert. I love the Derrick White clip as well; it was included in my propaganda piece for him. If you key in on him for an entire game, the number of times he does something that no other guard defender can do on defense is baffling. He's no Ausar or Amen athletically, but he causes the same amount of chaos, and I love it.
Great read and great list, I think my only qualm is Marcus Smart, any reasoning on no shout-out for the Lakers' only defender?
Ugh, I was hoping no one would bring him up ha, I don’t have a super satisfactory answer for you. I literally just wrote about how impactful he’s been for LA, but the numbers have never quite matched the eye test for me.
He’s got a strong statistical argument and he’s doing a lot of things sort of like Derrick White (albeit in different ways). No problem if you want to slide him onto 3rd team. There are a lot of really good defenders in the league, and I just couldn’t quite put him above the rest of the guys on the list. This is just a judgement call, and it might not be a good one.
He deserved to be in my honorable mentions, tho. I’ll fix that.
I don’t know if you saw Nekias Duncan’s list on Yahoo, but he had almost the exact same blurb about Marcus Smart. Basically said he thought Smart was having a fine season until he saw the crazy stats and then felt obligated to include him ha. More or less my story but I’m (perhaps wrongly) sticking to my convictions here ha