Does a players ability to understand 'team' offense correlate with defensive IQ?

[Hendrix]

I was watching some reel on one of the Raptors prospects, and while he doesn't have much post game or ability to create offense one thing stuck out, and that was he seemed to have a very good to understand team offense for a young 'raw' centre.

That made me wonder what the correlation would be on understanding team offense and having defensive IQ (Ie. being a good team defender).

You look at guys that were elite defensively from an intelligence POV (albeit also physically elite as well) like KG, Duncan, and Marc Gasol and they understood the offense well enough to make good reads, and that may translate to seeing the floor well defensively. Noah too is a fantastic passer that see the floor well defensively. Also, weirdly enough I remember reading a thing a while back that ranked Ben Wallace as an elite passer because even though he he only was around 2 apg in his prime, that is pretty good for someone that only averaged 7ppg, and having ~1 tov/game is pretty low. Pistons did actually run some plays using Ben as a passer and he did a good job making decisions in those scenarios.

Then on the other side of the spectrum you have guys like Javal Mcgee who's a bonehead passer or Al Jefferson who are notorious blackhole and they are not smart defenders even though their physical makeup is not holding them back.

There are exceptions to this observation on both sides, such as Spencer Hawes (though physically he has some defensive hang-ups).

Anyways, just wondering if you guys think there would be much correlation between showing an understanding of team offense, and understanding how to react on defensive as part of the team? If you could develop a measure to quantify 'passing', perhaps you could predict how well a player, or prospect could 'get it' as a team defender. If you could utilize assist%, tov%, usg% to get some kind of stat that describes how well you understand team offense, though you would have to factor in a player with stone hands would look worse with these stats and that wouldn't reflect in how good you understand team defense since you don't need as good of hand for that.

[blabla]

There are, as you said, exceptions to this.

Mutombo, I think, wasn't above average in understanding "team offense", and, compared to the rest of NBA players I'd say Ben Wallace wasn't above average either. Sometimes players really do not care about offense at all because they focus all their attention to the defensive side

For what it's worth, those who build "Statistical Plus Minus" models generally have some sort of term that includes "Assists" in their defensive formula, because that proved to be beneficial. What I'm trying to say is that lots of (good) player metrics give you a better defensive rating when you have more Assists