According to NBA insider Shams Charania, three 76ers earned All-Defensive honors, with DPOY candidate Ben Simmons landing on the first team and Joel Embiid and Matisse Thybulle making it on the second.
The most interesting name on that list is the aforementioned Thybulle, the second-year defensive phenom who is not yet a household name around the league like the rest of the players on these rosters. Heck, he's not even a regular starter, appearing in 65 games and only starting in eight of them. And he's not playing starter minutes from the bench à la Manu Ginobili or Jordan Clarkson, either. No, he averaged just 20.0 minutes per game.
That just so happens to be the fewest minutes averaged by a player on an All-Defensive roster... ever. In NBA history. Pretty wild, huh? Here are the ten lowest MPG figures among All-Defensive players in league history (via Stathead).
So he must have really made an impact when he was on the floor if he only had limited time, right? Right. He had the third-most steals in the entire NBA, and was in the top 20 for blocks, in that limited sample size. Per 36 minutes, he ranked first in steals per game and was the only non-big man in the top 15 for blocks per game. In defensive RAPTOR, an all-encompassing metric from FiveThirtyEight, he ranked behind only Rudy Gobert, Clint Capela and Jakob Poeltl.
And all of this was without his immaculate game in the postseason against the Wizards which once again made our jaws drop in complete and utter awe of his defensive mastery.
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Having Thybulle make the All-Defensive rosters along with Simmons and Embiid bodes well for the 76ers for obvious reasons... and with statistical history as extra support.
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