Cotton Fitzsimmons' Suns: Weirdly good on defense?

[B-Mitch 30]

I touched on this briefly in the 1991-92 Retro Player of the Year thread, but looking into it more, the Suns in the late 80's and early 90's were very good on defense. For the first three years of Fitzsimmons tenure as head coach, the Suns were in the top 10 of every defensive four factors category besides turnover percentage, and in his last season as coach, they were still in the top 12 of those statistics, with few other teams placing high in those stats at the same time. The raw box score suggests that Mark West and Andrew Lang were key parts in this, being good rebounders and shot blockers in their own right, which would explain why the team's defense declined when Lang and a few other players were traded for Charles Barkley. However, I was wondering if any other posters had ideas for why these Suns teams were so good at defense?

[Cavsfansince84]

Majerle and Rambis jump out. KJ was kind of feisty on defense. So overall I think a solid group probably with the exception of Chambers.

[kcktiny]

The 3 seasons of 1988-89 to 1990-91 the Suns were the league's 6th best team defensively at just 104.4 pts/100poss allowed. Key to that was allowing a league 3rd lowest 47.5% opponent 2pt FG% over that time. Their defensive rebounding percentage ranked just 10th in the league and their rate of turnovers forced 7th fewest/worst in the league over that time.

Those 3 seasons West and Lang combined to play 37 min/g and block an average of 280 shots a season (but 5.2 PF/g). Dan Majerle was an excellent defender for a SG/SF (played 29 min/g over the 3 seasons) and Jeff Hornacek was a very good defender for a SG/PG (33 min/g). Rambis and Xavier McDaniel were both very good defenders but played an average of just a combined 1500 min/season the 3 years.

[lessthanjake]

I think this gets tougher to explain with any one specific theory when we realize that the Suns were still a good defense in 1993, even after they got Barkley and switched coaches to Paul Westphal. They were 9th in the NBA in defensive rating that year, pretty similar to having been 8th the year before. So I don’t think we can really attribute this to the guys that left in the Barkley trade (Hornacek and Lang). I also don’t think we can attribute it to Rambis—who only played 5 games for Phoenix in 1993 and either wasn’t there or barely played in multiple other years in that era. Xavier McDaniel has been mentioned, but he was only there one year in that era. Kevin Johnson has been mentioned as a scrappy defender, but I’m fairly sure the 1993 Suns did well defensively when he was out for almost half the year (their record was good, so I am assuming their DRTG was good in those games too, though I’ve not done the work to check). Mark West was a good defender, but he didn’t play a huge number of minutes, so it’s hard to really put a ton of weight on him for this. Majerle was a very good defender and was around the whole time, but he doesn’t strike me as the type of guy that would single-handedly make a defense really good year after year. I think the best explanation is probably just that they were an athletic and talented team that played well together. A pretty banal answer, I suppose, but I don’t think there’s really one silver bullet answer to this.

[penbeast0]

Having a team defensive mindset is a very real thing. It's one reason I like superstars who work on defense and don't like those who don't. You can be a very good defense with one weak defender; look at the Hawks during the Fratello years for example. But it's much easier for a coach to build that defensive mindset when the star buys in. There are coaches who can instill it with a weak defensive star; they tend to have long careers but it's so much easier when your star isn't cutting practices and plays with energy on both ends.

And it will frequently extend for a year or so afterwards like when Milwaukee lost Moncrief but kept it up with Pressey taking his role for a year (though Pressey was an outstanding defender himself).