The Bald Man Cometh and Taketh
Alex Caruso is the Defensive Player of the Year
When Marcus Smart won the 2021-22 Defensive Player of the Year, I was a little peeved. Smart wasn’t even the best defensive player on his own team (Robert Williams III), let alone the league. And, most crucially, Smart was a guard.
I don’t like to paint with a broad brush, but guards should never ever in a million years win Defensive Player of the Year. Rim protection is the single most valuable defensive skill, and centers and power forwards are the protectors of premium basketball real estate.
Point-of-attack defense and steals are great, but a fantastic rim protector can clean up a guard’s mistakes in a way that no guard can make up for a poor rim protector. I say all of this to say, “Chicago Bulls guard Alex Caruso is the Defensive Player of the Year.”
Defensive metrics lag behind offensive metrics in their accuracy. Look no further than defensive box plus-minus and defensive Raptor. Those two metrics say Nikola Jokic is one of the best defensive players in the NBA. While I think Jokic’s defense is better than many people think (he racks up steals and deflections and is one of the best rebounders in the league), I also know he isn’t one of the five best defenders in basketball because if he were the Nuggets defense would be a whole lot better. However, outside of Jokic’s metric mastery, the top defenders by the two metrics make a lot of sense.
In order, the top-rated non-Jokic defenders by defensive box plus-minus (DBPM) are Giannis Antetokounmpo, Draymond Green, Kyle Anderson, Joel Embiid, Nic Claxton, Jarren Jackson Jr., and Jimmy Butler. That’s quite a list and one that shouldn’t garner much fuss. Raptor has Brook Lopez, Anthony Davis, Rudy Gobert, Joel Embiid, Josh Okogie, Steven Adams, Herbert Jones, Delon Wright, Dennis Smith Jr., and Draymond Green as the league’s top defenders. Once again, that’s a list of excellent defenders. The thing is, I didn’t just leave off Nikola Jokic. I also left off Alex Caruso, who is first in Raptor and second in DBPM after Jokic.
Alex Caruso isn’t in first by fractions. He’s heads and tails ahead of the competition. His 3.3 DBPM is 0.6 ahead of Giannis Antetokounmpo, the same gap that exists between Giannis and Jimmy Butler in 8th, and Caruso’s +6.1 defensive Raptor is 1.0 ahead of Brook Lopez in second. If you’re still skeptical, Dunks and Threes Estimate Plus-Minus also ranks Caruso first at +4.1 with a 0.3 gap between him and Dennis Smith Jr. in second. Defensive metrics aren’t the end-all-be-all, but when a player leads the league by a wide margin in a host of them, you should investigate further.
The backbone of Caruso’s elite defense is the steal. He averages 1.5 steals per game in only 23.5 minutes per game. Unsurprisingly, Caruso’s 3.0% steal percentage is tops in the league. Steals are the single most irreplaceable and important box score statistic, according to a FiveThirtyEight analysis from 2014. Back in 2014, NBA tracking data wasn’t widely available, but it should be no surprise that steals are a fantastic proxy for doing a bunch of other good things on defense that don’t end up in the box score.
With the introduction of tracking data in the 2015-16 season, we now know who the best ball deflectors are, and unsurprisingly Alex Caruso is one of the best in the business. Caruso’s 6.9 deflections per 48 minutes are first among players who have played at least 1,000 minutes. A deflection, while not as valuable as a steal, is still sound defense. It can lead to a steal for your teammate, result in the ball going out of bounds with limited time on the shot clock, or mess up the timing and best-laid plans of the offense.
Caruso does more than flash active hands. He is one of 13 players to contest five or more 3-pointers and 2-pointers per 48 minutes (minimum 1,000 minutes played). Standing 6’5, Caruso is the shortest player of the 13, with the average height coming in at 6’9. He may be the size of a shooting guard but is contesting shots at the rate of a much larger man, and he isn’t just leisurely throwing a hand up. His 0.7 blocks per game rank 51st in the league, and his 2.8% block percentage is 32nd, the highest figure for a player classified as a guard.
Caruso’s combination of shot blocking and stealing is incredibly unique and is almost a guaranteed identifier of an elite defender. Using 1,000 minutes as a cutoff, Caruso is one of ten players with a block and steal percentage of at least 2.0%. The ten players in my newly-dubbed 2-percenters club are Caruso, Matisse Thybulle, Larry Nance Jr., OG Anunoby, Herbert Jones, Xavier Tillman, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Jordan Goodwin, Josh Okogie, and Tari Eason. Out of that ten, he and Eason are the only players with a greater than 2.5% steal and block percentage. Throw in his 48 drawn offensive fouls, the eighth most in the league, and you have all the measurable actions you need to make Caruso’s case as the league’s best perimeter defender.
However, no one questions that Caruso is one of the game's best defenders, but why does he deserve to be Defensive Player of the Year? The answer lies in his on-off impact.
The Chicago Bulls finished the 2022-23 NBA season with the league’s fifth-best defensive rating of 112.2 is a sentence no one thought they would be writing, and the bald man is the primary reason. With Caruso on the court, the Bulls’ defensive rating drops to 109.2 and promptly explodes to 114.72 with him on the bench. The Cleveland Cavaliers finished the season with the league’s best defensive rating of 110.6. Caruso takes the Bulls from being roughly an average defense (114.8 league average defensive rating) to the best defense in the league by far.
The truth is, the Bulls have no business being an elite defense. Their at-one-point All-Star trio of DeMar DeRozan, Nikola Vucevic, and Zach LaVine is about as porous a defensive unit as they come. With that trio on the court without Caruso, the Bulls posted a defensive rating of 117.98. The moment you throw Caruso in the mix, the defense magically improves to 109.09. Crucially, there isn’t any fluky opponent 3-point shooting variance, as the difference with and without Caruso is 0.09% in favor of the group without him.
The Bulls’ superb defense has Caruso’s fingerprints all over it. They sport the league’s fifth-best turnover rate at 13.5% and improve dramatically in opponent shot quality and efficiency when he’s on the court. Usually, a dominant big that protects the rim or lords over the weakside anchors a team’s defense. Without a traditional defensive anchor, the Bulls turned to Caruso’s ability to disrupt from the perimeter to the same effect.
Alex Caruso has pushed the limits of defensive impact at the guard position. If the Bulls’ stars had lived up to expectations on the offensive end, there’s a real chance they would have pushed for home-court advantage in the first round of the playoffs. Instead, they needed a mad dash at the end of the season to claim the ten-seed, DeMar DeRozan’s daughter to sing the siren’s song of free throws in Toronto, and a final win in Miami just to face the Milwaukee Bucks as the eighth seed.
I still don’t believe guards should win Defensive Player of the Year, but Caruso has made me reconsider that rule. If I had a vote, which I don’t outside of the Above the Break podcast, I would vote for Brook Lopez. His combination of elite rim protection and sheer volume has been the backbone of the Bucks’ defense, and he has a significant minutes edge over Caruso. However, I now believe that a historic season from a perimeter player can best a strong season from an interior defender, and Caruso had a season for the ages. He just comes up a little short in the minutes department.
On a per-minute basis, there’s a strong case that Caruso was the NBA’s Defensive MVP. He did more with less from a position that isn’t supposed to be that impactful. While the Defensive Player of the Year award voting will be dominated by frontcourt players, we shouldn’t let our preconceived notions blind us to a truly special season. Alex Caruso is a defensive savant, and unfortunately, like many geniuses, he won’t properly be appreciated in his time.
As Larry David once said, "Anyone can be confident with a full head of hair. But a confident bald man - there's your diamond in the rough."
I think he was talking about Alex Caruso.