On the subject at hand (KPOY), it has an individual defensive component, an overall team strength component, a usage/minutes component, and an efficiency component.
He kills it in the defensive category because of his steals and defensive rebounds. Those are the 2 easiest to track defensive categories (along with blocks), so they are weighted quite strongly in the defensive stops formula. Steals are awesome for the team as they (unlike defensive rebounds) are not easily replaced by other, lesser players on the team and they add strongly to winning (turnover for the other team and transition opportunity for you). He's one of the best UConn players ever in forcing steals. His actual defensive value is probably less, because guards generally don't have as much impact as big guys, but true defensive impact is hard to quantify with stats, especially at the college level (and he sure looked good against Cumberland yesterday).
On the team strength component, we're the 4th best KenPom team in the conference, so he's aided there despite our actual poor record. He's nowhere near the National KPOY race because we're (and he is) nowhere near good enough. But the conference is middle loaded, so he doesn't lose a lot of ground to any other KPOY front-runners (and actually is ahead of Precious here).
He's top 10 in usage in the conference, and 6 of the other top 10 are on substantially worse teams. So it's basically between him, Cumberland, and Precious. Mills would be here as well, but doesn't play enough minutes (and suffers in the individual defensive metrics). Wichita doesn't have anyone high enough in usage to be relevant in the KPOY discussion. Nate Hinton has basically all the good metrics (best KenPom team, good defensive rebounding rate and steals%, above average ORTG), but doesn't have near enough usage. You can't win with a sub 20% usage% (plus his 3pt% has tanked in conference play hurting his efficiency).
So between those two and CV, Cumberland has better efficiency numbers, but Precious's are substantially worse. Precious's turnovers and free throw shooting are both real issues. Cumberland has much better assist numbers, better shooting numbers, and draws more fouls on more possessions used, but a worse turnover rate. Up until yesterday, Cumberland was on top of the leaderboard.
My thoughts as a Vital "skeptic" (as in I think he's good not great and makes both winning plays and non-winning plays in varying measures on a game by game and sometimes minute by minute basis): He's probably overrated by the limited available defensive metrics (or maybe I underrate steals despite talking them up above). Nobody is having an especially strong combination of both usage and efficiency in conference this year. There's no Bazz, Rob Gray, etc, or even a last year Cumberland (he's enough worse this year to make a difference). So CV's defensive numbers put him over the top of Cumberland for now. Ken doesn't list this, but I'd imagine this is the worst AAC KPOY race ever. 2 of the top 5 teams are balanced and 3 are built on high usage but only slightly above average to terrible efficiency players. Vital has a real chance of winning this one if he keeps up his ORTG (3 of past 4 games have been above 95 whereas only 2 of his first 7 were) and Cumberland doesn't pick it up. In that scenario, KenPom has a growing influence on voters, so if we do take advantage of our relatively easy schedule to close out and finish as a top 4 seed, I could see him winning the real award, too.
