Draymond Green's injury seemingly knocked him out of Defensive Player of the Year race, but it shouldn't have

Green should still be in the thick of this race if he finishes the season healthy

When Draymond Green played his last game, he was well on his way to locking up the Defensive Player of the Year award. He'd already crossed the even-money threshold at most books by early January despite starting the season as a roughly +2500 underdog. He was still favored for weeks after his Jan. 9 injury when the assumption was that he was missing time with a relatively minor calf injury. But as the weeks passed and a calf injury turned into a back injury, he slowly began to lose ground.

Now, he's almost fallen out of the debate. Caesars Sportsbook has him at a preposterous +6000 due to the time he's missed. Six defenders have better odds than he does, suggesting that the books no longer have any faith in Green's candidacy whatsoever. While he's clearly surrendered his favored status, the notion that he should fall out of the race entirely seems a bit farfetched in context.

Green is expected to return Monday against the Washington Wizards. If he does so and plays in every remaining Warriors game, he would finish with 48 games played total (47 if you don't count his seven-second stint in Klay Thompson's return). Let's assume he sits out half of Golden State's three remaining back-to-backs. That would leave him with 45 (really, 44) total games played. This would, obviously, be an enormously low number for any major award winner. The fewest games a Defensive Player of the Year has played during an 82-game season was 56. That was Rudy Gobert during the 2017-18 season. Pushing the precedent down 11 games to just 45 would be bold. That's less than 55 percent of the season, and let's not forget that he was averaging fewer than 30 minutes per night when he was healthy.