Doctor MJ wrote:Good stuff, but a lot. Focusing just on the things I feel compelled to respond to:OhayoKD wrote:
Well offense is as perimiter oriented as ever right now and the best playoff defenses of this period have been...
-> The Giannis bucks
-> The Gasol Raptors
-> The Ad Lakers
-> The Draymond Warriors
Note that all these defenses have seen collosal collapses tied to the named player and all these defenses have the guy named leading the lineup stuff when they're doing atg things(notably the bucks collapsed to a little bit better than average in the regular season when lopez/jrue started posting comparable defensive +/- and then went back to all-time great in the playoffs with giannis lineups specifically doing the best)
What would you need to see to consider things clear cut?
I think databall has just made it more obvious that bigs are the leaders here. The change is in the ==type== of big, but all these bigs share alot of similarities with hakeem defensively.
I think the fact that the best defender of the current age, Draymond, imho, is shorter than Scottie Pippen and has smaller hands with less vertical threat than Michael Jordan says a lot about how much weight "type" is carrying carrying here.
But I certainly won't deny that size has advantages to defense. All of these guys are extremely large human beings after all.
I mean you can say this, but i'm pretty sure if you do the same "paint-load" thing i did with a random warriors playoff game, you'd probably find draymond taking up a bigger proportion of positions as the rim deterrent or co-rim deterrent than pippen and mj combined.
Does the process of getting there matter(intelligence/positioning as opposed to jumping or height) if the end result is the same? If a big defensively is a guy who protects the paint more than everyone else, draymond is still very much a big.