NBA: Top 10 candidates for 2019-20 Defensive Player of the Year

The Golden State Warriors enter the 2019-20 NBA season with a dramatically reworked roster and missing a key element due to injury.

If the Warriors ever needed Draymond Green at his prime defensive best, this would be the year.

Much has been made of what the Warriors lost on the offensive end of the floor with the departure of Kevin Durant and the ACL injury that will sideline Klay Thompson for much of this season.

But it’s at the defensive end where Golden State might struggle … mightily.

Thompson is quietly a very solid perimeter defender and Durant’s defense has always been vastly underrated because of that whole drop 40-points-in-his-sleep thing he does offensively.

In Thompson’s place, the Warriors acquired D’Angelo Russell. The good news? Russell made tremendous strides as a defender last season. The bad news? Those strides took him from absolutely God-awful to merely well below-average.

Green still has some defensive game, ranking fourth in Defensive Real Plus/Minus last season at plus-3.74. But the Warriors will have little in the way of rim protection this season aside from Green, whose blocks per game have been slowly but steadily declining since he was named NBA Defensive Player of the Year in 2016-17.

That season, Green averaged 2.0 steals and 1.4 blocks per game, numbers that slid to 1.4 and 1.1 respectively last season. Per 36 minutes, that decline has been from 2.2 steals to 1.7 and from 1.5 blocks to 1.2, so it’s not just a matter of him playing fewer minutes.

And there is a team component to the award that has to be considered.

The last time a player from a team ranked outside the top-10 in defensive rating was named Defensive Player of the Year was Marcus Camby in 2006-07, who won the award while anchoring the 12th-ranked defense of the Denver Nuggets.

Throw in the antics that have turned many voters against Green and it’s an uphill climb for him to be considered a legitimate contender.