Our second NBA Tuesday miniseries gets an update today, as the Oklahoma City Thunder won their first-ever league championship in crazy fashion, defeating the Indiana Pacers in seven games. We already did our MVP and ROTY analyses last week, so today we take on the Finals MVP and Defensive Player of the Year awards. Next year, we will combine these two miniseries into one, probably, like we did with the WNBA bits.

2025 NBA FINALS MVP: Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, PG, Oklahoma City (original, confirmed)

So, OKC beat Indiana in seven games, and the Pacers were lucky to be there—and unlucky to suffer a major injury to their best player in the series. And it still went seven games! How? Well, the Thunder played down to its competition, as on a neutral court, OKC should have won this matchup readily (by 11 points per game, based on sabermetrics). Indiana played way over its head, and the Thunder kept screwing it up, basically.

Forget the TV ratings, too: we have to take this on face value as OKC point guard Shai Gilgeous-Alexander won the Finals MVP vote. In the end, his 3.9 WS in the playoffs topped all others, as no Pacers player individually secured more than 2.6 WS in the postseason. That’s a big gap, and we can’t overlook it despite the holes in SGA’s game (28.3-percent shooting from downtown, etc.). We confirm the vote, though uneasily.

2025 NBA DPOY: Evan Mobley, PF, Cleveland (original); Ivica Zubac, C, Los Angeles Clippers (revised)

We usually don’t comment on these trophy races during the season, but this year we had to: the voters really screwed up. Cleveland Cavaliers power forward Evan Mobley (3.8 DWS) won the DPOY vote, despite finishing a whopping 16th in Defensive Win Shares! The Cavs had such a great season, so maybe the voters thought they owed the team something? No other explanation for just how bad this vote result was.

Meanwhile, two players really separated themselves from the pack in DWS: SGA (4.8 DWS) and Los Angeles Clippers center Ivica Zubac (4.7). No other vote earners posted over 4.0 DWS. Yet SGA finished tied for tenth in the vote, while Zubac was sixth. Come on, people! Where are your effing brains?! Oddly, OKC small forward Luguentz Dort (3.2) finished fourth in the voting process. That is just insane, really.

But there were no other players from the Clippers who earned any DPOY vote, so we lean toward Zubac for this award, denying SGA a double double he certainly was worthy of achieving. Yet … when we look at the overall league list for top DWS earners, the Clippers have both the second (Zubac) and third (PG James Harden) guys on that list. Whoa! Now, we know OKC was a defensive powerhouse, too, so let’s dig deeper.

We’re not sure where the arbitrary line should be drawn, since we used to use 5.0 DWS as a minimum for this award, but the league has changed a bit since then. So, let’s look at any players over 3.0 DWS on this list: the Thunder have five players with at least 3.0 DWS, while the Clippers have just three players meeting that threshold. In the Top 10, each team has two players with shooting guard Jalen Williams (sixth) in the fray.

OKC was clearly the better team, although Zubac might have had a little bit more top-shelf defensive support. Still, it’s hard to overlook the two Thunder players with 7.0 DWS combined down this list. Basically, the league champs had a whole lineup’s worth of defensive standouts, while the Clippers did not. In the end, that’s what clinches it for us: Zubac carried a bit more water than SGA, and it was needed more.