It’s time again for another edition of Thursday Thorns, as we revisit a stale topic, for sure: Draymond Green and his fat mouth. We saw some clueless mediots make a reference to Green as a top candidate for the NBA Defensive Player of the Year award, and based on our historical analyses of such voting, we find it extremely unlikely he will win the hardware, even if some extremely uninformed people ballot him.

Green does not appear in the league’s Top 20 for Defensive Win Shares, now that the regular season is complete. With just 3.4 DWS, he’d be 21st at best on this list. One thing we noticed is that there are a lot of players bunched together on the Top 20, in terms of range between the top (4.8 DWS) and the bottom (3.4 DWS). And there are four Oklahoma City Thunder players on this list, which takes them all out of it.

We don’t know who will win the award, of course, as the voters aren’t always very smart; however, rarely do the mediots pick a player who isn’t somewhere in the Top 10 for DWS. So, that is going against Green right now, and whenever the awards are announced (June?), we will follow up with our own analysis. Yet if we had to pick someone right now based on raw data, it would be someone in the Top 9 at 4.0-plus DWS. Fact.

Within the Top 9, there are teammates from the Thunder and the Los Angeles Clippers. That drops us down to only five legitimate contenders, the way we see it: Boston Celtics power forward Jayson Tatum (4.2); Houston Rockets center Alperen Şengün (4.2); Miami Heat C Bam Adebayo (4.0); Cleveland Cavaliers C Jarrett Allen (4.0); and Minnesota Timberwolves C Rudy Gobert (4.0), a four-time DPOY vote winner.

However, if we dig deeper into the Top 20, we see teammates from Minnesota (No. 10, No. 14), Houston (No. 11), and Cleveland (No. 16). That means Gobert, Şengün, and Allen had some help in the defensive realm, and we like solo artists—or at least guys that carried a lot of water without a lot of support. That leaves us with Tatum and Adebayo, who had no teammate support in the Top 20 DWS. From there, we go to the seeds.

The Heat finished 10th in the Eastern Conference with a sub-.500 record; the Celtics finished second in the conference with a 61-21 mark. But Miami was third in scoring defense, and Boston was second—with a difference of about 2.8 ppg, which was probably all Adebayo, considering the rest of his team wasn’t super stellar. We’d be fine with either of these guys winning the DPOY vote, as they are the two best candidates.

We don’t need to make our pick right now, nor will we. But we know there is no way, in any sane universe based on sabermetric data, that Green should win it.