therealbig3 wrote:lessthanjake wrote:https://youtu.be/HcTT5X5BCns?si=kjhIdGSbyWe8ioxi
If you go to 9:50 in the video, you see Kenny Smith talking about something that I think is really important regarding Jordan’s defense. I touched on this in an earlier post, but want to highlight it again now that I’ve found this video.
Kenny Smith says about Jordan: “If you look at Michael, he’d have the correct hand in the passing lane. Defensively, he’s the only guy, he’s the Deion Sanders of basketball, where you wouldn’t run a play on his side of the court because he could defensively stop that side of the court.”
This is a hugely important point about Jordan’s defense IMO. What made those Bulls teams one of the greatest defenses ever (including having very arguably the best playoff defense ever) despite not having an elite rim protector is, in large part, that they just uniquely constricted what teams could reasonably do. You can’t make a high-value pass if you’re too worried a defender is just going to get his hand on the ball. You can’t take that extra dribble in the post to get better position or on a drive to get closer to the basket if you’re too worried about being stripped. So you settle for something worse, just as an offense might settle for a worse pass rather than throw it near Deion Sanders. That doesn’t show up in the stat sheet for the defensive player whose disruptive ability is deterring the offense from taking valuable actions, but that is very impactful—just like how Deion Sanders’ impact was really mostly the deterrence rather than the actual interceptions he ended up getting. As Kenny Smith suggests, Jordan was perhaps the best in history at this kind of deterrence, and it was a massive part of what made those Bulls defenses so elite. He wasn’t the only one having this kind of effect for the Bulls, but he was definitely the most important in this regard.
Ultimately, it’s great for big men to deter players from shooting near the rim. That’s typically an integral part of having an elite defense! But it can actually be just as effective to deter the pass or dribble that gets the player the ball near the rim in the first place. That’s what Jordan did, and that’s how the Bulls were able to be an all-time defense without elite rim protection.
You’re giving the majority of the credit to Jordan but why not Pippen, or Grant, or Rodman, or Cartwright, or Oakley before them?
No, obviously there were other great defenders on the Bulls. You cannot have an all-time great defense with just one great defender—that will never happen. But in this particular aspect of defense, he was the most important. This is not different from assessing any player that’s part of a team. Obviously they’re not the only piece of the puzzle!
Jordan was great, but you can be great and overrated. These kind of anecdotal stories is kind of what I’m talking about, I’ve heard this one before and it’s going to make Jordan sound amazing, but the reality is that he had his defensive weaknesses as well that were covered up by strong defensive teammates, and the actual objective data that’s been posted shows that the Bulls barely noticed a difference without Jordan.
But you see that’s just not really an accurate reading of the totality of the information we have. That’s basically just dogmatically focusing on the regular season during Jordan’s first retirement. We also have the Bulls being one of the worst defenses in history in Jordan’s injured 1986 year, while being way better in the surrounding years with Jordan. We have the Bulls being way better defensively in the games in 1986 where Jordan played remotely normal minutes. We have the Bulls being substantially better defensively in the second-three peat years than they’d been without Jordan—including being *massively* better in the playoffs, to the point of being arguably the best playoff defense in NBA history. Meanwhile, we have the Bulls having easily their worst playoff defensively in the entire 1988-1998 span in the one year they played in the playoffs without Jordan. We have the Bulls regular season defense in 1995 quickly getting to second-three-peat levels with Jordan once he had a few games under his belt back from retirement. We also have Pippen and Rodman missing tons of games in the second-three-peat years, with the Bulls’ defensive rating staying just as good in the games they missed (and actually being better without Pippen). And we have the Bulls doing way worse defensively in 1999, despite having been incredible defensively in tons of games in 1998 without Pippen. Overall, the totality of the type of data you’re talking about actually goes strongly in Jordan’s favor, but I think you’re focusing on the only uncharitable data point (which is specifically just the regular season defense during Jordan’s first retirement being good without Jordan) to come to a contrary conclusion. WOWY data is super noisy and subject to a lot of other variables, so it’s no surprise that there’d be an uncharitable WOWY data point *somewhere*. Which is why it’s obviously way better to look at the full picture of info, rather than focusing on one data point. And the overall picture of this type of data looks like a player with immense defensive impact.
Idk the with/without that was posted before is pretty damn convincing. That’s over YEARS, and even included post prime LeBron when he was supposedly not even playing good defense anymore. Meanwhile, Jordan’s numbers were posted almost as a response, and it doesn’t look nearly as impressive.
But you see that data isn’t actually “over YEARS”. The “Bulls without MJ” piece of that is basically just in 1994 and 1995. Meanwhile, it’s comparing to the “Bulls with MJ” data from the entire time period. It’s comparing apples and oranges, because the team in 1994 and 1995 was a different team than the team in other years (both in terms of roster differences and player development differences), and the league context was also different. This is especially true when we talk about the earlier years in that time period, which, not coincidentally were years that bring down the “with MJ” averages.
Of course, that data also doesn’t talk about playoff defense at all—a very important note, since the Bulls with Jordan consistently got better defensively in the playoffs (while not doing so without him). It’s not surprising that wasn’t included, since if we took a weighted average of the Bulls’ playoff rDRTG from 1988-1998 with Jordan, it comes out to -5.4, compared to -1.3 without Jordan in the 1994 playoffs, for a large 4.1 difference with Jordan.
That’s also not even mentioning that that analysis misses the massive signal from 1986 compared to surrounding years, where the Bulls had one of the worst defenses in the history of the NBA in the year Jordan missed the vast majority of games, while they were much better in surrounding years with him.
In other words, the data you’re relying on is tailored to ignore Jordan’s great signals and to water down the “with Jordan” numbers to make Jordan’s least charitable signal look as uncharitable as possible. It’s not holistic analysis of the overall picture at all. And, as I’ve said, the overall picture is one that is indicative of immense defensive impact. So yeah, I’d say the “story” I was talking about *does* line up with the facts. It also lines up with the eye test of someone who watched all of the Bulls’ games during that timeframe.
Bronsexuals are ridiculous with their revisionist history. Also, Marc Gasol crushed Lebron is advanced metrics (defensive) the year he beat him out for DPOTY (2013). Moreover, winning DPOTY while not making 1st Team All Defense isn’t even unprecedented. It happened the previous year with Tyson Chandler (2012) and also happened to Mutombo in ‘94 and Alvin Roberson in ‘86. Furthermore, you’re confusing 1st Team All NBA with 1st Team All Defense 
Additionally, there are scores of clips showing showing Lebron standing around daydreaming while the man he’s “guarding” blows right past him 
LeBron is 0-7 in game winning/tying FGs in the finals. And is 20/116 or 17% in game winning/tying FGs in the 4th/OT for his career. That's historically bad 
