Bill Russell averaged 15.1 points per game during his career. He shot 44 percent from the floor and 56 percent from the line. It is fair to say he is not in the Hall of Fame, and considered one of the greatest players in league history because of his PER (even though it was, in his era, quite, quite good). He’s in Springfield because he was where the opposing team’s offense went to die.
“On offense,” Russell was once quoted as saying, “It’s possible to take a break, to stand around for a bit, let other players take over. On defense, if you take a break, a good offensive team will burn you. On the other hand, when you and your teammates are all doing the job — and you’re all that good — the great reward is watching the other team slowly suffocate.”
He is first in league history, per basketball-reference.com, in Defensive Win Shares, at 133.6 for his career. He ranked first in the league in that category in 12 of his 14 seasons, and in the other two seasons, he was third and second. He’s still second all-time in league history in rebounds.
And, if he put up the exact same numbers today, he’d likely get a contract approximating that of, say, Clint Capela. Very good money — five years, $90 million — to be sure. We will not need to hold any telethons to help out the Capelas any time soon. But not max money. Not close to max money.
Which necessarily begs the question: Why, still, don’t elite defenders get paid in the NBA at the same level as elite scorers? It’s not like, after all, no defense gets played during the season; that’s what we see at the All-Star Game. (At least until the Elam Ending came to town last year in Chicago!) Under the current rules, teams would regularly bust 160 or 170 if there was no one trying to stop them.
Okay, Utah did give Rudy Gobert a huge deal — one of the biggest in NBA history, a $205 million extension over five years — and it wasn’t because he dives to the cup well. In the tradition of Russell, Gobert is a one-man wrecking crew by himself. The two-time Defensive Player of the Year destroys opponent pick-and-roll hopes, inhales sorties to the front of the rim and scares others from even trying. (I mean, just look at this. Some of this stuff is amazing — Luka, Dame, Embiid, Karl-Anthony Towns, doesn’t matter; in space or at the rim, Gobert snuffs all of them.)
But the value Utah saw in Gobert’s skill set, along with the set itself, are outliers in today’s NBA.
If, to pull out the hoary cliche, defense wins championships; if the Nets — correctly — lament their awful current defense, and know it’s not championship caliber; if the Warriors’ titles were built not on the Splash Brothers’ 3s, but Draymond Green’s switchability, why is it that great defenders are rarely paid at the highest levels at contract time? Boston rewarded Marcus Smart handsomely when he hit free agency – $52 million over four years – but not near the level of Jayson Tatum ($195 million over five), Jaylen Brown ($115 million over four) or Kemba Walker ($141 million over four).
Why does Oklahoma City’s Luguentz Dort, who shackled James Harden in the Bubble last fall and is already thought of as one of the league’s best on-ball defenders, get a four-year, $5.4 million deal, rather than $15-20 million per?
Why was someone like Isaac Okoro, a defensive wizard in college at Auburn, and who has been vitally important to Cleveland’s sudden turnaround this season — he leads the Cavaliers in minutes played (35.4) for a reason, guarding the opposition’s best scorer night in and night out, while averaging just 8.5 points per game entering play Wednesday, when he had Kawhi Leonard on the docket with the incoming Clippers — not seriously considered by either teams or draftniks to be the first pick in the draft last year?
“Because the league doesn’t allow defense anymore,” one team president texted this week. “When they got rid of hand checking (in 2005), game over.”
Okoro argued his No. 1 merits before the draft to teams up and down the Lottery, up to and including the Timberwolves, who had the first pick. That he went fifth to Cleveland was an accomplishment.
“I did make that case,” he said on a Zoom Wednesday morning. “I feel like, coming in, I’ve had a great impact. Even growing up, I’ve always had an impact. I’ve always been a winner. I feel like I’ve always done the little things to help the team win — if that was rebounding, if that was getting on the floor, if that was guarding the best player, like I do right now. I feel like I’ve always done the little things to help the team win.”
We are well past the days when guys like Bruce Bowen and Shane Battier helped invent the “3 and D” position in the early 2000s. Bowen would park himself in the corners; Battier at the top of the key, and each would make enough 3s to allow their coaches to unleash what they did best to elite offensive opponents: contest shot after shot, play after play, game after game. But neither got paid commensurate with their impact.
“The plight of the defender is like an infantryman in the army – essential, but will probably never get the love for the work they put in,” said Battier, now the Heat’s vice president of basketball development and analytics. “If you’re a defensive player, you accept that. You sort of accept that.”
Players like Okoro, and Bowen and Battier before him, are generally graded on a curve. Most individual defense has, literally, been legislated out of the league over the past 20 years. Hand checking, bumping cutters, the overt physicality of the game in the ’80s and ’90s – you name it, it isn’t there anymore, by design. The NBA wanted to showcase its greatest offensive talents, and it has. It is. Every night, someone’s going for 40 or 50, it seems. And the league is fine with that.
Other sports pay out for defense. The pitcher is still sacrosanct in baseball; nothing happens until they throw the ball to the plate. And great pitchers, like Gerrit Cole and Stephen Strasburg and Zack Greinke and David Price, get paid commensurate with the other top players in the game. Pitchers represented seven of the 10 highest-paid players per year in the game going into the COVID-shortened 2020 season, per MLB.com. Goalies and defensemen are well-represented among the NHL’s highest-paid players.
In the NFL, sure, quarterbacks tend to make the most. But pass-rushing defensive ends and cornerbacks aren’t thirsty at contract time, either. “They glorify both sides,” one agent said of the NFL’s pay scale, pointing out that elite defensive coordinators also get compensated well by NFL teams.
“I think it’s probably fair to say that elite offensive players who are a minus on defense are paid more than elite defensive players who are a minus on offense,” said Minnesota’s Executive Vice President of Basketball Operations Sachin Gupta, who heads the Timberwolves’ analytics efforts and is thought of as one of the true pioneers in bringing advanced numbers front of mind to NBA franchises — having been in the rooms where it happened both with Sam Hinkie in Philadelphia and Daryl Morey in Houston.
Maybe, then, in the NBA, it’s not “defense wins championships” anymore. Maybe it’s “good enough defense to slow down today’s 3-point nighty barrage, holding a team to, say, less than 15 made 3s a game in the Finals, and forcing them into contested 2s while taking away their rim runs, and it would be nice to not get clobbered on the glass, but even that isn’t as important as getting back in transition and cutting off their water, wins championships” — which, while more accurate, is much harder to put on a quickly-donned hat after winning the conference finals.
“I feel like not a lot of people think of defense as a skill,” Indiana’s Caris LeVert said, before being sidelined to have surgery to treat renal cell carcinoma of his left kidney late last month.
“I think people think of defense as ‘effort,’ and trying hard at that end of the floor, and thinking,” he said.” I feel like we’re all great athletes. One through 15, we’re all pretty good athletes, and everyone’s capable of playing defense. I think that’s why guys who are quote-unquote defenders aren’t necessarily highly valued. Because this is a scoring league. Scoring is what’s pretty. Scoring is what people value in this league. We feel like if you can teach someone to play defense, if you can teach someone to be in the right spot, that’s much more valued than a guy can’t necessarily score as well.”
That’s basically what another GM said: it’s harder to teach a good defensive player to become a good offensive one than vice versa. Guys who do both, like Leonard, are thus worth their figurative weight in gold. And some of the game’s best two-way players – Leonard and Giannis Antetokounmpo, Chris Paul and Paul George and others — have gotten huge deals, in part, because of their defense. Green did get a max extension for his unique defensive abilities and inspire new mid-sized players that there was a role for them in the game.
And spacing has become so critical to the modern game. If you can’t bend defenses your way with a credible threat to make a 3, it’s very, very difficult to get regular playing time. Teams don’t have the luxury of not shooting the three, not when their opponents are regularly hoisting 40 or 50 a night. It’s not a luxury to have multiple shooters on the floor; it’s a necessity.
“On defense, there’s more to defensive schemes, and it’s more of a team concept,” Gupta said, “whereas, at the offensive end, it’s more, like, just individual talent and skill. That might be part of it also.”
Also: fewer colleges today have the time to teach the fundamentals of defense, from man-ball through step slide drills, help drills, shell drills, to boxing out. Most big-time schools are dealing primarily with one-and-done players, and once high schoolers are allowed back into the draft, the lack of fundamentals is likely to be more acute. A men’s Power 5 coach only has a blue-chipper for a few months, through the end of the team’s run in the NCAAs. After that, the kid is gone, off to private workouts in California or similar for two months before the NBA draft, to work on the very things he would have worked on with his college coaches had he stayed there.
Back in the day, there were any number of schools known for their hard-nosed defensive philosophies: North Carolina, Georgetown, UNLV, Duke, Indiana, UCLA, Arkansas, Temple, and on and on. Today, can you name many schools that are known, year in and out, for their defensive prowess, other than Virginia, with its Pack Line, Michigan State and a handful of others?
And, we don’t always know what we’re seeing on defense. Is it a 2-3 matchup zone, or a 1-3-1? What’s an individual defender’s responsibility in, say, icing a pick and roll? Who’s the best rotating wing in the league? How does one determine that in a proprietary way?
Individual defense “isn’t measured well, so (it’s) harder for teams to identify who to pay,” one GM said. “For offense, an individual scorer like (Harden) can make a good offense all by himself and his skills are more unique, while defense is more of a team endeavor.”
People in the analytics community are trying to flatten the curve when it comes to defensive metrics. Adjusted plus-minus is generally accepted as at least peeling some of the layers of the defensive onion. “It’s noisy,” Gupta said, “but for a whole season, over two or three seasons, it starts to show you who’s having impact.” Synergy and other companies do a good job with player tracking and breaking down individual defensive effectiveness in pick and roll sets. FiveThirtyEight.com came up with the backronym DRAYMOND in 2019 for its stat that measures the best players at limiting the open space of opposing shooters. But it’s still a work in progress.
“It’s almost like trying to explain the origins of the universe,” Battier said. “Scientists know up to the nanosecond when the big bang happened. But they don’t know what happened in that first nanosecond.”
Team defensive rating is generally considered to be a good measuring stick, but it’s harder to pinpoint who among the five people on the floor at a given time is most responsible for a stop on a given possession. How do you measure who has great anticipation, awareness, an understanding of geometry, being able to process a lot of info in a short period of time? All are vital to great defenders.
“I still think there’s room to grow in terms of understanding what makes a good defensive player,” said former Seattle Storm forward Alysha Clark, who signed with the Washington Mystics this week, and who was All-Defensive First Team in the WNBA last season, and who finished second to Candace Parker for WNBA Defensive Player of the Year.
“It’s not always about blocks and steals,” Clark said. “For me, as somebody that has taken pride in that, and understands that, okay, tonight I’m guarding Diana (Taurasi). You’re never going to hold any of these players scoreless, but, okay, the shots that I get her to take, are they tough, contested shots? When she plays against us and my team, is her shooting percentage lower than when she plays other teams? I think those are the types of things, moving forward, that’s where the area to grow is. … Defense is complex, is what I’m trying to say.”
That is indeed true. Our colleague John Hollinger has acknowledged that his PER, the gold standard when it comes to measuring offensive greatness, is not as robust in measuring defensive contributions, even though blocks and steals are part of the statistical formula used to devise it. (Steals represent a dilemma all on their own; they can be easily devalued if players hunt them to the point where they leave themselves, and by definition, the rest of their teammates, out of position if they start jumping into passing lanes early to hunt them.)
“We are really good at measuring offense,” Battier said. “It doesn’t take an advanced basketball mind to say ‘That’s really good offense.’… that’s why basketball is so accessible and why people love it. Our ability to understand defense is still really behind our understanding of offense. Defense is often contextual, whereas offense is ‘did he make the shot, or did he miss the shot? Did he pass the ball or make the cut?'”
I’m agnostic about these things. It is fine with me if the NBA has come to think offense is more important than defense, that you go higher and get paid better if you can put the ball in the basket than if you can prevent same. That offense wins championships, and defense just isn’t all that important, at least not most of the time. We’re all adults here. It’s okay.
Just say it out loud.
Bill Russell averaged 15.1 points per game during his career. He shot 44 percent from the floor and 56 percent from the line. It is fair to say he is not in the Hall of Fame, and considered one of the greatest players in league history because of his PER (even though it was, in his era, quite, quite good). He’s in Springfield because he was where the opposing team’s offense went to die.
“On offense,” Russell was once quoted as saying, “It’s possible to take a break, to stand around for a bit, let other players take over. On defense, if you take a break, a good offensive team will burn you. On the other hand, when you and your teammates are all doing the job — and you’re all that good — the great reward is watching the other team slowly suffocate.”
He is first in league history, per basketball-reference.com, in Defensive Win Shares, at 133.6 for his career. He ranked first in the league in that category in 12 of his 14 seasons, and in the other two seasons, he was third and second. He’s still second all-time in league history in rebounds.
And, if he put up the exact same numbers today, he’d likely get a contract approximating that of, say, Clint Capela. Very good money — five years, $90 million — to be sure. We will not need to hold any telethons to help out the Capelas any time soon. But not max money. Not close to max money.
Which necessarily begs the question: Why, still, don’t elite defenders get paid in the NBA at the same level as elite scorers? It’s not like, after all, no defense gets played during the season; that’s what we see at the All-Star Game. (At least until the Elam Ending came to town last year in Chicago!) Under the current rules, teams would regularly bust 160 or 170 if there was no one trying to stop them.
Okay, Utah did give Rudy Gobert a huge deal — one of the biggest in NBA history, a $205 million extension over five years — and it wasn’t because he dives to the cup well. In the tradition of Russell, Gobert is a one-man wrecking crew by himself. The two-time Defensive Player of the Year destroys opponent pick-and-roll hopes, inhales sorties to the front of the rim and scares others from even trying. (I mean, just look at this. Some of this stuff is amazing — Luka, Dame, Embiid, Karl-Anthony Towns, doesn’t matter; in space or at the rim, Gobert snuffs all of them.)
But the value Utah saw in Gobert’s skill set, along with the set itself, are outliers in today’s NBA.
If, to pull out the hoary cliche, defense wins championships; if the Nets — correctly — lament their awful current defense, and know it’s not championship caliber; if the Warriors’ titles were built not on the Splash Brothers’ 3s, but Draymond Green’s switchability, why is it that great defenders are rarely paid at the highest levels at contract time? Boston rewarded Marcus Smart handsomely when he hit free agency – $52 million over four years – but not near the level of Jayson Tatum ($195 million over five), Jaylen Brown ($115 million over four) or Kemba Walker ($141 million over four).
Why does Oklahoma City’s Luguentz Dort, who shackled James Harden in the Bubble last fall and is already thought of as one of the league’s best on-ball defenders, get a four-year, $5.4 million deal, rather than $15-20 million per?
Why was someone like Isaac Okoro, a defensive wizard in college at Auburn, and who has been vitally important to Cleveland’s sudden turnaround this season — he leads the Cavaliers in minutes played (35.4) for a reason, guarding the opposition’s best scorer night in and night out, while averaging just 8.5 points per game entering play Wednesday, when he had Kawhi Leonard on the docket with the incoming Clippers — not seriously considered by either teams or draftniks to be the first pick in the draft last year?
“Because the league doesn’t allow defense anymore,” one team president texted this week. “When they got rid of hand checking (in 2005), game over.”
Okoro argued his No. 1 merits before the draft to teams up and down the Lottery, up to and including the Timberwolves, who had the first pick. That he went fifth to Cleveland was an accomplishment.
“I did make that case,” he said on a Zoom Wednesday morning. “I feel like, coming in, I’ve had a great impact. Even growing up, I’ve always had an impact. I’ve always been a winner. I feel like I’ve always done the little things to help the team win — if that was rebounding, if that was getting on the floor, if that was guarding the best player, like I do right now. I feel like I’ve always done the little things to help the team win.”
We are well past the days when guys like Bruce Bowen and Shane Battier helped invent the “3 and D” position in the early 2000s. Bowen would park himself in the corners; Battier at the top of the key, and each would make enough 3s to allow their coaches to unleash what they did best to elite offensive opponents: contest shot after shot, play after play, game after game. But neither got paid commensurate with their impact.
“The plight of the defender is like an infantryman in the army – essential, but will probably never get the love for the work they put in,” said Battier, now the Heat’s vice president of basketball development and analytics. “If you’re a defensive player, you accept that. You sort of accept that.”
Players like Okoro, and Bowen and Battier before him, are generally graded on a curve. Most individual defense has, literally, been legislated out of the league over the past 20 years. Hand checking, bumping cutters, the overt physicality of the game in the ’80s and ’90s – you name it, it isn’t there anymore, by design. The NBA wanted to showcase its greatest offensive talents, and it has. It is. Every night, someone’s going for 40 or 50, it seems. And the league is fine with that.
Other sports pay out for defense. The pitcher is still sacrosanct in baseball; nothing happens until they throw the ball to the plate. And great pitchers, like Gerrit Cole and Stephen Strasburg and Zack Greinke and David Price, get paid commensurate with the other top players in the game. Pitchers represented seven of the 10 highest-paid players per year in the game going into the COVID-shortened 2020 season, per MLB.com. Goalies and defensemen are well-represented among the NHL’s highest-paid players.
In the NFL, sure, quarterbacks tend to make the most. But pass-rushing defensive ends and cornerbacks aren’t thirsty at contract time, either. “They glorify both sides,” one agent said of the NFL’s pay scale, pointing out that elite defensive coordinators also get compensated well by NFL teams.
“I think it’s probably fair to say that elite offensive players who are a minus on defense are paid more than elite defensive players who are a minus on offense,” said Minnesota’s Executive Vice President of Basketball Operations Sachin Gupta, who heads the Timberwolves’ analytics efforts and is thought of as one of the true pioneers in bringing advanced numbers front of mind to NBA franchises — having been in the rooms where it happened both with Sam Hinkie in Philadelphia and Daryl Morey in Houston.
Maybe, then, in the NBA, it’s not “defense wins championships” anymore. Maybe it’s “good enough defense to slow down today’s 3-point nighty barrage, holding a team to, say, less than 15 made 3s a game in the Finals, and forcing them into contested 2s while taking away their rim runs, and it would be nice to not get clobbered on the glass, but even that isn’t as important as getting back in transition and cutting off their water, wins championships” — which, while more accurate, is much harder to put on a quickly-donned hat after winning the conference finals.
“I feel like not a lot of people think of defense as a skill,” Indiana’s Caris LeVert said, before being sidelined to have surgery to treat renal cell carcinoma of his left kidney late last month.
“I think people think of defense as ‘effort,’ and trying hard at that end of the floor, and thinking,” he said.” I feel like we’re all great athletes. One through 15, we’re all pretty good athletes, and everyone’s capable of playing defense. I think that’s why guys who are quote-unquote defenders aren’t necessarily highly valued. Because this is a scoring league. Scoring is what’s pretty. Scoring is what people value in this league. We feel like if you can teach someone to play defense, if you can teach someone to be in the right spot, that’s much more valued than a guy can’t necessarily score as well.”
That’s basically what another GM said: it’s harder to teach a good defensive player to become a good offensive one than vice versa. Guys who do both, like Leonard, are thus worth their figurative weight in gold. And some of the game’s best two-way players – Leonard and Giannis Antetokounmpo, Chris Paul and Paul George and others — have gotten huge deals, in part, because of their defense. Green did get a max extension for his unique defensive abilities and inspire new mid-sized players that there was a role for them in the game.
And spacing has become so critical to the modern game. If you can’t bend defenses your way with a credible threat to make a 3, it’s very, very difficult to get regular playing time. Teams don’t have the luxury of not shooting the three, not when their opponents are regularly hoisting 40 or 50 a night. It’s not a luxury to have multiple shooters on the floor; it’s a necessity.
“On defense, there’s more to defensive schemes, and it’s more of a team concept,” Gupta said, “whereas, at the offensive end, it’s more, like, just individual talent and skill. That might be part of it also.”
Also: fewer colleges today have the time to teach the fundamentals of defense, from man-ball through step slide drills, help drills, shell drills, to boxing out. Most big-time schools are dealing primarily with one-and-done players, and once high schoolers are allowed back into the draft, the lack of fundamentals is likely to be more acute. A men’s Power 5 coach only has a blue-chipper for a few months, through the end of the team’s run in the NCAAs. After that, the kid is gone, off to private workouts in California or similar for two months before the NBA draft, to work on the very things he would have worked on with his college coaches had he stayed there.
Back in the day, there were any number of schools known for their hard-nosed defensive philosophies: North Carolina, Georgetown, UNLV, Duke, Indiana, UCLA, Arkansas, Temple, and on and on. Today, can you name many schools that are known, year in and out, for their defensive prowess, other than Virginia, with its Pack Line, Michigan State and a handful of others?
And, we don’t always know what we’re seeing on defense. Is it a 2-3 matchup zone, or a 1-3-1? What’s an individual defender’s responsibility in, say, icing a pick and roll? Who’s the best rotating wing in the league? How does one determine that in a proprietary way?
Individual defense “isn’t measured well, so (it’s) harder for teams to identify who to pay,” one GM said. “For offense, an individual scorer like (Harden) can make a good offense all by himself and his skills are more unique, while defense is more of a team endeavor.”
People in the analytics community are trying to flatten the curve when it comes to defensive metrics. Adjusted plus-minus is generally accepted as at least peeling some of the layers of the defensive onion. “It’s noisy,” Gupta said, “but for a whole season, over two or three seasons, it starts to show you who’s having impact.” Synergy and other companies do a good job with player tracking and breaking down individual defensive effectiveness in pick and roll sets. FiveThirtyEight.com came up with the backronym DRAYMOND in 2019 for its stat that measures the best players at limiting the open space of opposing shooters. But it’s still a work in progress.
“It’s almost like trying to explain the origins of the universe,” Battier said. “Scientists know up to the nanosecond when the big bang happened. But they don’t know what happened in that first nanosecond.”
Team defensive rating is generally considered to be a good measuring stick, but it’s harder to pinpoint who among the five people on the floor at a given time is most responsible for a stop on a given possession. How do you measure who has great anticipation, awareness, an understanding of geometry, being able to process a lot of info in a short period of time? All are vital to great defenders.
“I still think there’s room to grow in terms of understanding what makes a good defensive player,” said former Seattle Storm forward Alysha Clark, who signed with the Washington Mystics this week, and who was All-Defensive First Team in the WNBA last season, and who finished second to Candace Parker for WNBA Defensive Player of the Year.
“It’s not always about blocks and steals,” Clark said. “For me, as somebody that has taken pride in that, and understands that, okay, tonight I’m guarding Diana (Taurasi). You’re never going to hold any of these players scoreless, but, okay, the shots that I get her to take, are they tough, contested shots? When she plays against us and my team, is her shooting percentage lower than when she plays other teams? I think those are the types of things, moving forward, that’s where the area to grow is. … Defense is complex, is what I’m trying to say.”
That is indeed true. Our colleague John Hollinger has acknowledged that his PER, the gold standard when it comes to measuring offensive greatness, is not as robust in measuring defensive contributions, even though blocks and steals are part of the statistical formula used to devise it. (Steals represent a dilemma all on their own; they can be easily devalued if players hunt them to the point where they leave themselves, and by definition, the rest of their teammates, out of position if they start jumping into passing lanes early to hunt them.)
“We are really good at measuring offense,” Battier said. “It doesn’t take an advanced basketball mind to say ‘That’s really good offense.’… that’s why basketball is so accessible and why people love it. Our ability to understand defense is still really behind our understanding of offense. Defense is often contextual, whereas offense is ‘did he make the shot, or did he miss the shot? Did he pass the ball or make the cut?'”
I’m agnostic about these things. It is fine with me if the NBA has come to think offense is more important than defense, that you go higher and get paid better if you can put the ball in the basket than if you can prevent same. That offense wins championships, and defense just isn’t all that important, at least not most of the time. We’re all adults here. It’s okay.
Just say it out loud.
