Josephpaul wrote:Good point but it has to be more than Kobe' s rep. He made 2nd team defensive this year , so Obivously the selection comittie see his decline.
Not really. There's literally nothing that supports the idea that Kobe is a good defender any longer.
Every way you can look at his defense, he's not worth an All-Defensive selection. It's nice that they finally took him off of the First Team, but it was (pardon the pun) offensive that he made it in 2010 and 2011 in particular.
This is a nice place to start if you want to look at a statistical analysis of the problem and the cognitive dissonance between him making the team and what the numbers say.
Being at the bottom is visually striking, but it’s actually not that damning in and of itself. If my knock on Kobe was that he was only the 20th best defender in the league on average, this would not be that horrendous of a knock. After all, big men dominate these kind of lists, maybe he’s still won of the top 5 or so perimeter defenders in the game, no?
No. The more damning thing is that every metric I’ve broken down here has Kobe’s defensive impact as utterly average. -0.8, -0.6, 0.1, 0.1, these are not numbers of someone who is consistently a game changer on defense. The other guys given even half the love Kobe’s gotten over the year, pretty consistently do turn up on these metric doing quite well.
I’ll point out also: it’s not that +/- considers Kobe vastly overrated across the board. If I were to post the analogous charts for Kobe on offense, he’d typically look like a superstar. Both Ilardi & Engelmann’s 6 year metrics rank Kobe as a top 3 offensive player in the game.
Now, those are "just" numbers. It's several years worth of studies, and they are numbers that, when given that kind of sample, tend to match what we see when we study things through video recap, but people don't trust numbers and they can be twisted. Still, it's a mega-trend, and it does match the changes you do see if you start watching Kobe on defense.
drza had a comment below the article that went further:
The second aspect, which has been pointed out in comment but could have been presented more strongly in the narrative, is that Kobe doesn’t even stand out among the wings and guards as a defender. Looking at how Kobe compares to a top-20 list is cool, but it gives the impression that he might be just at the bottom of the top-20. But a quick glance through the Ilardi list shows Kobe ranked outside of the top-200 among all defenders (204th) from 2003/4 – 2008/9, and the first Engleman study has him at 522nd among all defenders from 2005 – 2011. I stopped counting in the Ilardi study when I got to 36 PG/SG/SFs rated higher than Kobe defensively and that was only through 90 players overall.
So in other words, not only isn’t Kobe anywhere near the best big man defenders…he’s not even among the best LITTLE MAN defenders. His defense is decidedly average…being outside of the top-200 (let alone the top-500) during the time period that hits much of his athletic prime is a glaringly huge red mark. Especially for someone whose accolades suggest that he’s arguably the best little man defender in history, and on the short list for best overall all-time.
Anyway, there's tons of stuff there.
Bleacher Report did an article about it as well, found
here.That article kind of focused on declining steals and blocks per game, as well as Defensive Win Shares (compared to his own previous marks).
There's a Phil Jackson quote:
“Kobe’s defense, to be accurate, has faltered in recent years, despite his presence on the league’s all-defensive team. The voters have been seduced by his remarkable athleticism and spectacular steals, but he hasn’t played sound, fundamental defense.
"Mesmerized by the ball, he’s gambled too frequently, putting us out of position, forcing rotations that leave a man wide open, and doesn’t keep his feet on the ground.”
Jackson said this in his book “The Last Season: A Team in Search of Its Soul.”
We've had two different RealGM threads about it,
here and
here.One of them degenerated into a Lebron/Jordan thread, which was annoying.
All-Defensive Teams are decided by coaches, who have overwhelmingly favored Kobe through reputation. He does not rate well at all in DPOY voting, however, which is voted on by the media.
Just to get that going, think about this. Paydro made this comment in the second thread, but the coaches, who are also responsible for All-Rookie teams, voted Adam Morrison to the team.
Adam Morrison was actually 80th in win shares among rookies that year (at -1.5). He played 29.8 mpg 78 games and 23 starts. 11.8 ppg, 2.9 rpg, 2.1 apg. Not bad-looking stats, right? 37.6% FG, 33.7% 3P, 71.0% FT.
0.18 FTR, remarkable inability around the rim, weak shooting ability from range (all of which were strengths of his in college). 45% TS, 91 ORTG, -2.2 OWS. Now, even Lebron and KD had bad scoring seasons as rookies, although their usage rates were considerably higher, so that's at least a little more understandable. Morrison, of course, continued to suck at a similar level later on his career, but we couldn't know that right then. Long story short, he played some ABYSMAL basketball and he was still voted to the All-Rookie team by coaches who still see things in terms of PPG, "swagger" and other nonsense.
Morrison, by any form of evaluation (be it statistical or video-based, etc) was PUTRESCENT in his rookie season, but the coaches still thought to give him some recognition.
And these are the guys you want to trust with the All-Defensive Teams in this argument?