The Best Defenders in the NBA this Season

What Have You Done for Me Lately?

The NBA is a right now league. Each game can change in a moment. Every season’s trade deadline brings about substantial team restructuring, and the offseason free agency and trade market has become an event unto itself. Change happens quickly, and the team that wins the championship is often the team that becomes the best version of itself at just the right moment.

Many of the most important questions deal with which player or team is the best right now. “What have you done for me lately?” is the unspoken question on the minds of everyone in and around the league. In previous posts, I’ve used the defensive matchup data at stats.nba.com to create a model for defensive performance since 2013-14. The entire dataset is now features prominently on the homepage, and you can pull any player card for any season from the Google Sheets tool.

But what about this season?

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The Best Defensive Power Forwards in the NBA

Small ball is no longer the wave of the future – it’s the wave of the present. The 80’s and 90’s featured brawny, bruising power forwards who could soak up punishment in the post, clean the glass, and protect the paint as weak side shot blockers. In a game dominated by giants, power forwards were the centers’ sidekicks. Even the beginning of the 21^st century saw the San Antonio Spurs’ “Twin Towers” follow the same frontcourt structure that had held sway throughout the league’s existence.

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The Best Defensive Small Forwards in the NBA

In the last installment of this series, we evaluated the best defensive shooting guards. We noted that the shooting guard group is crucial in the modern NBA due to the advantages gained by employing versatile defenders capable of stopping opponents of different sizes and skill sets. The same rationale applies for the players in the “small forward” bin using basketball-reference.com’s play-by-play position designations. When compared with the previous group, the main difference is that the small forwards are larger. (perhaps we should start calling them “big wings”?)

Wings, whether they are categorized as “shooting guards” or “small forwards,” exhibit greater spread in the defensive load they carry than other position groups do.

While the median values are relatively consistent across positions, wings have a wider distribution than other positions. Raw defensive load for wings can range from very high (>15 ppg) to very low (<6 ppg). Other positions, especially interior defenders, have much more compressed distributions.

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Who are the Best Defensive Point Guards in the NBA?

Rankings are among the most popular exercises for most NBA fans, and also among the least efficient ways to evaluate data. The enduring appeal of rankings and lists owes to their relationship, however tangential, with the big questions: Who is the best? Which player is better? How much better or worse would a team be if they replaced this player with that one? Every fan, analyst, scout, coach, and executive needs to be able to answer these questions.

The problem with rankings is not the questions they address, but the biases implicit in ordinal numbering. Our brains are trained to think that the difference between 12 and 17 is the same as the difference between 18 and 23, and that all these values are on a different order of magnitude from single digit numbers. When we transfer these assumptions to rankings of the “Top 50 Players in the NBA” or something similar, we start with false presuppositions. There is not an identical difference in value between each pair of contiguous players on any player ranking. Even a hypothetically perfect, pie-in-the-sky ranking that ranked players in the exactly correct order would still need something besides the ranking to indicate the players’ true value relative to their peers. Our habit of using ordinal numbers to rank players blinds us to the shape of the data.

As a result, both league insiders and outsiders spend an inordinate amount of time debating questions such as “Is Kevin Durant the second-best player in the league or the eighth-best?” “Is Paul George a top 5 player, a top 10 player, or a top 15 player?” What really matters is how much a player contributes to wins by helping put points on the board (on offense) and keep points off the board (on defense). If the 6^th ranked player in the league and the 16^th ranked player are nearly identical in terms of their contribution to team success, it makes little sense to lay so much weight on their difference in the rankings.

What a valuable ranking system can tell us is how much value a player generates, relative to the rest of the population. In answering the question posed in the title of this article, I will attempt to provide enough context for the reader to be able to comprehend the shape of the data. As such, let’s start with refining the question itself:

Who are the best defensive point guards in the league?

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Steals Don’t Mean Squat

If there’s one thing we know about defensive statistics in the NBA, it’s that steals don’t mean squat. James Harden was second in the league in steals per game last year, and Andre Drummond was eighth. This was not merely an illusion created by the two playing lots of minutes, as both ranked within the top 20 in the league in steals per 36 minutes. In 2016-17, Manu Ginobili and T.J. McConnell were first and second in the league, respectively, in steals per 36 minutes. Steph Curry and Nerlens Noel were both in the top seven in the league in 2015-16, while the same two players along with Pablo Prigioni all ranked in the top eight in the league the previous season. Andray Blatche was eighth in the league in steals per 36 in 2012-13. The illusion extends back as far as steals go in the statistical record.

The Real Reasons Why Steals Don’t Mean Squat

These examples are merely anecdotal evidence, though; what really makes steals unreliable indicators of defensive performance are the many different chains of events which can lead to a player being credited with a steal in the box score. Many of those sequences involve plays made by teammates of the player who gets credit for the steal. Any observer can recognize these plays when they happen: tipped passes, saves on balls headed out of bounds, instances in which an on-ball defender pokes the ball away from the dribbler and another defender grabs the loose ball, traps, double teams, errant passes caused by pressure on the ballhandler, etc. Sometimes a steal is the result of a phenomenal play by one defender, but oftentimes a steal is the result of one player disrupting the offense and another player recovering the ball. Steals create an immediate problem of attribution; the player who gets credit for the steal is not always the player who truly created the turnover.

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