Mobley named NBA’s top defender

Evan Mobley said his goal coming into the season with the Cleveland Cavaliers was to win the NBA Defensive Player of the Year award.

He got it done.

The Cavs consider Mobley to be their best defensive player, and the league thought even more highly of him. Mobley held off fellow finalists Dyson Daniels of Atlanta and Draymond Green of Golden State for the award, the results being announced Thursday night in a broadcast on TNT.

“It just feels great to finally get this award,” Mobley said.

Saying “finally” might be a bit of a stretch. Mobley is only 23 — the fifth-youngest player to win the award, joining fellow 23-year-olds Dwight Howard, Jaren Jackson Jr., Alvin Robertson and Kawhi Leonard as winners of the Hakeem Olajuwon Trophy.

Mobley won the award in a season where he was an All-Star for the first time and set a career high for scoring.

“That was going hand-in-hand all year,” Mobley said. “I was trying to figure out how I could be more offensively productive and still maintain my defensive style and prowess. So, I feel like I did a good job this year and it clearly shows.”

But the case Cleveland coach Kenny Atkinson made for Mobley was how different the Cavaliers’ defensive numbers were with Mobley on the court and without. Put simply, with him on the court, they were airtight.

“It’s a huge dip, like 12 places or something,” Atkinson said. “That really screams out, to me. Probably the No. 1 stat that I look at.”

It was a wide-open race with seven players getting at least one first-place vote and Mobley getting the top spot on only 35% of the ballots. There was a consensus, however, that he was a top-three player — Mobley was listed somewhere on 85% of ballots, by far the most of anyone in the DPOY chase.

Green won the award in 2017, was a top-three finisher for the fifth time, and was bidding to become the 11th player in NBA history to win it at least twice. Mobley won it for the first time, after finishing third in the voting in 2023. Daniels was a finalist for the first time.

Daniels was second in the voting, with Green third.

Daniels had 229 steals this season, the most in the NBA since Gary Payton had 231 for the Seattle SuperSonics in 1995-96. Daniels was also the first player to average more than 3.00 steals per game since Robertson for the Milwaukee Bucks in 1990-91. Nate McMillan averaged 2.959 in 1993-94 for Seattle; John Stockton averaged 2.976 in 1991-92 for the Utah Jazz.

“Clearly, in my mind, he’s the defensive player of the year,” Hawks coach Quin Snyder told reporters last month. “I think in a lot of people’s minds, the things that he’s doing, even offensively the double-doubles. I think maybe the conversation should go to his character, because, as I’ve thought about and answered those questions about his balance, his anticipation, a lot of the attributes that allow him to do are usually focused on what he does on the court. And I think the correlation between who he is as a player and who he is as a person is very high.”

Based on Daniels, Green and Mobley all being finalists, it’s reasonable to think that they will be on the All-Defensive team when it is released by the NBA later this spring. It would be the ninth All-Defensive selection for Green, the second for Mobley and the first for Daniels.

Journey makes Browns fans believe

CLEVELAND (AP) — The Cleveland Browns took a Journey to the first night of the NFL draft.

As if having a top-five pick didn’t create enough interest, the Browns decided to reward their season ticket holders by bringing in Journey for a concert at Huntington Bank Field before the picks began.

Brent Rossi, the Browns’ chief marketing officer, said the talks about doing something beyond the usual draft party began at the end of last season, when the Browns finished 3-14 and secured their 14th top-10 draft pick since returning in 1999.

In a third-party survey, the Browns found the top three rock bands by season ticket holders to be Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones and Journey.

Since there’s no hope for another Zeppelin reunion and the Stones played in Cleveland last year, the option ended up being Journey.

“When you have a chance to marry one of the NFL’s tentpole events with a band like Journey, it was a no-brainer for us in something that we wanted to do for season ticket members, especially showing so much loyalty over the last decades and last year when the product on the field didn’t live up to expectations,” Rossi said.

It’s not the first time an NFL team has tried to bring in a big act for the draft. The Los Angeles Chargers had Snoop Dogg at SoFi Stadium in 2022 during the first round.

Season ticket holders received free tickets equaling the number of seats in their account. The Browns said final attendance was 25,081.

Fans were tailgating in the parking lots before the concert started.

Cleveland also had a first-round pick for the first time since 2021. They sent three first-round selections to Houston in the Deshaun Watson trade and signed him to a massive contract in what is on pace to become one of the worst trades in NFL history.

Journey came on at 6:45 p.m. and was expected to play for 90 minutes, finishing their set right before the Browns were supposed to go on the clock with the second-overall pick. Cleveland, however, made a trade with Jacksonville and moved down three spots to fifth along with adding picks in the second and fourth rounds and the Jaguars’ first-round selection in 2026.

It took only three songs for the 2017 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductees to play what could be the theme tune for all the teams this weekend and a franchise that has had only four winning seasons since 1999 — “Don’t Stop Believing.”

The Browns have tied into the city’s rock heritage in recent seasons, including a guitarist in the Dawg Pound bleacher section during games.

Last year, the team honored the Rock Hall’s Class of 2024 during a game. Foreigner, who was inducted that weekend, performed at halftime.