There are a couple of key qualifiers here. Firstly, individual defensive rating is a flawed stat that ascribes a lot of circumstantial factors to players for which they are largely not going to be responsible, effectively assigning individual responsibility for something that is fundamentally a collective activity. And secondly, it has only been four NBA games.
Nevertheless, during the opening two weeks of the 2026-27 NBA season, Devin Booker of the Phoenix Suns has the highest defensive rating of all rotation players across all the teams. And his teammate, the other DB, Dillon Brooks, has the second-worst.
Individual defensive rating is not a statistic in which high numbers are good. Per the data at NBA.com – whose stats are being used here – a player’s defensive rating is a measure of the number of points the opposing team scores per 100 possessions while that player is on the court. And you do not need to know much about basketball at all to know that keeping that number down is kind of the whole aim of the game.
Sample Size Factors, But Only Slightly
Among players with at least 20 minutes per game played on the season – so as to weed out the anomalous results of, say, Milwaukee Bucks rookie Bogoljub Markovic’s 192.3 mark in all of five minutes played – the Suns’ wing duo have the NBA’s worst marks. And even with the caveat of the small sample size, a look at the other end of the spectrum shows the sort of names one would expect to see among the list of the best defensive players in the NBA. Individual defensive rating can be an injustice to a player, but only up to a point.
In direct opposition to Booker’s 137.2 defensive rating – and Brooks’s 136.9 – Alex Caruso of the Oklahoma City Thunder with their top-five defense leads the NBA with an 80.9 mark, followed by Mo Bamba, Alpha Diallo (a quality defensive player who arrives in the NBA ready to guard, and whom the Suns once had an interest in), Rudy Gobert and Herb Jones. Impactful defensive players all.
Suns Off To A Bad Start
On the season so far, the Suns have only one win and a 1-3 record. Their 124.5 opponent points per game total is third-worst in the NBA, behind only the Chicago Bulls and Sacramento Kings, two teams that have combined for a 1-10 record to date. When measured by team defensive rating, however – which adjusts for the various paces that teams play at – the Suns are by far the worst defensive team in the NBA, a full four points worse than either of those other two.
Last season, on their way to a 45-37 record, the Suns actually managed to put together a top-ten defense (that is to say, tenth). With Mark Williams as the anchor in the middle – alongside enthused contributions from Jordan Goodwin, Oso Ighodaro and Ryan Dunn – the Suns kept the pace down, forced turnovers and protected the paint.
So far this year, though, Williams has been absent with a shoulder injury, and will be out for most if not all of the season. Despite returning the vast majority of the same line-up that finished last season, the bottom has fallen out of the Suns’ defensive cohesion, giving up somewhere in the region of four million wide-open three pointers per game. Williams, the paint anchor, would only have had a minimal impact in that part of the game anyway. It is up to the perimeter players to listen, communicate, hustle and contest, while also trying to do their share on the glass.
In the cases of Booker and Brooks in particular, that sequence of events is not there. The Suns are discombobulated on defense in a way that goes far beyond what the communication and rebounding of Williams could have shored up. The buy-in, it would appear, has gone. And without it, it could be a long season.
So Far, Devin Booker is the NBA’s Worst Defensive Player