Victor Wembanyama was on all 100 first-team ballots. Second and third in Defensive Player of the Year voting were Chet Holmgren and Ausar Thompson. Rudy Gobert picked his ninth All-Defensive Team. Derrick White was the fifth member of the initial squad. Those were the five names when the NBA announced its 2025-26 All-Defensive First Team Friday night. OG Anunoby isn’t on the list and the New York Knicks coaching staff wasn’t going to let that go quietly.

Anunoby was named to the All-Defensive Second Team alongside Bam Adebayo, Cason Wallace, Dyson Daniels, and Scottie Barnes. Knicks head coach Mike Brown did not wait to be asked about the placement. “Print this,” Brown said, closing a Zoom interview with reporters. “OG got robbed. He is First Team All-Defense.” When beat writer Stefan Bondy reported the quote, it immediately became the sharpest single sentence in the post-announcement conversation.

Brown went further: “Freakin’ OG got robbed. He should’ve been first team all defense. The versatility that guy brings to this team is off the charts, and I hope the voters get it right next time around. I’m happy he’s second team, he deserves something, but it was wrong.”

Karl-Anthony Towns, who watched Anunoby lockdown opposing wings all season from a front-row seat, did not wait for a formal question either. “Nobody wants to ask OG about second team all-defense? Damn. He’s one of the best defenders in the world, and he got robbed from first,” Towns said.

The subject of all of it was characteristically measured. “Any recognition is good,” Anunoby said when reporters finally reached him. “There’s a lot of good defenders in this league, so to be recognized as one of the 10 best is great.” He acknowledged the feeling without theatrics: “I felt like I should have been First Team All-Defensive, but Second Team will do.”

The case the Knicks were making was not without merit. Anunoby was among the top five forwards in defensive versatility metrics, guarding point guards through centers depending on the matchup, and was a cornerstone of a New York defense that ranked among the top 10 in the league throughout the season.

The five players chosen ahead of him, Wembanyama, Holmgren, Thompson, Gobert, and White, are all defensively elite, but the argument for Anunoby over White or Gobert specifically had circulated in analytics circles for weeks before the announcement. Gobert’s ninth selection in particular drew scrutiny, given his offensive limitations becoming more exposed in the playoffs, a concern Chris Finch of the Timberwolves had acknowledged publicly just days earlier.

The Snub That Reveals a Broader Voting Problem

The OG Anunoby reaction is part of a recurring conversation about whether the All-Defensive voting process adequately captures positional versatility. The First Team featured three big men, Wembanyama, Holmgren, and Gobert, alongside Ausar Thompson and Derrick White, a composition that left no room for a wing defender of Anunoby’s profile, regardless of his individual performance.

It is the same structural issue that has seen players like Mikal Bridges and Kawhi Leonard finish lower than their individual defensive impact suggests year after year, as voters are anchored to traditional positional categories in an era where the most valuable defensive players are the ones who transcend them.

Wembanyama’s unanimous selection was expected and correct. He led the league in blocks per game at 3.1 and won Defensive Player of the Year without a single dissenting vote for the first time in the award’s history. The debate around him is nonexistent. The debate around the four spots beneath him on the First Team is exactly what Brown, Towns, and Anunoby himself were responding to on Friday night. Second team, as Anunoby put it, will do. But the Knicks made sure the record reflects they thought differently, and they made sure it was in print.