Bigger gap defensively - Kawhi, Kobe, MJ

[falcolombardi]

Jordan>>Kawhi>>Kobe.

For career Jordan is the best of the three.

Lol no,kawhi was a better defender than jordan

[lessthanjake]

This thread is a mess, full of misinformation. The 86 jordan games he played were full of teams with inept offenses so we're the 95 bulls games

This is not a consequential point as it relates to arguments in this thread. I’ve made two points in this thread about the games Jordan played in 1986 and 1995:

1. In the games in 1986 that Jordan actually played even close to normal minutes in, the Bulls’ defense with Jordan was a lot better than it was the rest of the season.

2. After his first few games coming back from retirement in 1995, the Bulls defense was better than it had been without Jordan, and was in line with how good it later was in the second-three-peat years.

You suggest here that that is just a mirage resulting from playing low quality opposing offenses in those games. That’s not correct. Let’s take these two points one by one and adjust for opponent offensive quality:

As to 1986, the Bulls’ relative DRTG (adjusting relative to the specific opponents’ offense) in the games Jordan played at least 30 minutes in was +2.48. The Bulls’ rDRTG in the games Jordan played 35+ minutes in was +1.68. That is compared to a +5.2 rDRTG the Bulls had for the season as a whole. So yeah, even adjusting for specific opponents’ offense, the 1986 Bulls defense was a lot better in the few games where Jordan actually played even remotely normal minutes. Which is unsurprising given that the Bulls defense was also a lot better in the surrounding seasons, in which Jordan consistently played.

As to 1995, the Bulls’ relative DRTG (again, adjusting relative to the specific opponents’ offense) after Jordan’s first five games back from retirement was -5.24. That is super high, and obviously better than their overall rDRTG that season or in 1994. It’s also very consistent with the -5.1 rDRTG that they averaged in the second-three-peat years (see Thinking Basketball data for that number), as well as the -5.8 rDRTG they’d put up in the 1996 season specifically.

Link??statmuse has the bulls defense had 112 ortg when jordan plays 35+ minutes

Lol, Statsmuse doesn’t understand what you’re asking for, and is giving you the defensive rating in all the games Jordan played that season—which obviously includes mostly games Jordan played very low minutes. I just ran a statsmuse search for it to try to replicate what you did and that’s what it spit out. If you actually look at the results it is giving you, I’m sure it says 18 games (i.e. all the games Jordan played). The reason it’s doing that is because it is thinking you’re asking for games with Jordan where the Bulls as a whole played at least 35 minutes, which is obviously every game Jordan played. Please try to actually do a sense check of what you’re posting before saying it, especially when you’re trying to refute something someone else posted.

I don’t have a link to provide you because I actually took the time to do the analysis myself. I can tell you exactly what I did though:

I went to each relevant box score on basketball-reference and then recorded the number of points the opposing team scored. To get the number of possessions, I recorded basketball-reference’s estimate of the pace of the game, because that is an estimate of the number of possessions per 48 minutes. If the game had overtime (not sure off the top of my head if any of these particular games did), then I adjusted up that possession number (i.e. for instance, for a single overtime, to get an estimate of the number of possessions in that game you’d take (53/48)*Pace). You can get the Bulls’ DRTG in each game by dividing the points given up by the number of possessions and multiplying by 100. I then went to basketball-reference’s page for that season and recorded each specific opponents’ overall ORTG that season. Now that I had the Bulls’ DRTG in each game, and the opponents’ season ORTG, I got the rDRTG for each game by subtracting the opponents’ season ORTG from the Bulls’ DRTG in that game. In order to get the Bulls’ rDRTG over the course of multiple games, I took a weighted average of each relevant game’s rDRTG, weighted by the number of possessions in each game.

You’re free to run the same analysis yourself, and I am confident you will come to the same results.