All-Defense Teams were officially announced, and there was one name surprisingly left off the First Team: Scottie Barnes.
Raptors fans were largely expecting their franchise star player to make the First Team because of his defensive versatility, but voters had other ideas.
The final voting was close. Barnes finished with the sixth-most voting points, narrowly missing the First Team by 16 points. The most likely reason was his slight defensive drop-off over the final two months of the season.
Barnes’ late-season defensive dip changed the All-Defense race
That drop-off coincided with Barnes taking on more playmaking responsibility while starting point guard Immanuel Quickley dealt with injuries. Although Barnes only missed one game, he was also dealing with nagging injuries after the All-Star break, which also may have contributed to his lesser impact on defense.
From March 1 to the end of the season, Barnes had an extremely good, but not quite great, defensive rating of 111.7. Before March 1, his defensive rating was 109.4. Defensive rating measures how many points per 100 possessions a team allows when a player is on the floor. It is not a perfect statistic, but it helps show Barnes’ small slip over the final stretch of the season.
His counting stats also dipped. Barnes went from averaging 3.0 stocks (steals + blocks) before March 1 to 2.6 stocks after.
Let’s be clear: Barnes was a defensive monster all year long. Still, the final quarter of the season represented a small step backward. That was enough for voters to decide he did not belong on the All-Defense First Team.
Raptors put too much on Barnes’ plate
The biggest dip seemed to come when Barnes took on more point guard responsibilities in Quickley’s absence. In doing that, Toronto asked Barnes to be the fulcrum of its offense and defense at the same time. It was unfair to ask Barnes to carry that kind of burden, but he mostly succeeded, even if it may have cost him in the All-Defense race.
It would have been nice for Barnes to become the first Raptor to make an All-Defense First Team, but that won’t happen this year. Instead, Raptors fans will have to wait until next season, when Barnes will hopefully have a similar level of impact on that end of the floor without being asked to do quite as much offensively.
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