#3 Best Defensive Point Guard of All Time - The ten best defenders in each position project

[Gibson22]

We move on to the third place, the #3 best defensive Point Guard of all time.

1. https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?f=64&t=1749476 Jason Kidd
2. https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?f=64&t=1750160 Walt Frazier

There are 18 candidates.

K.C.Jones (Boston, 1959/1967)
Jerry West (Lakers, 1961/74)
Wali Jones (Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Utah Stars, Detroit, 1965/76)
Norm Van Lier (Cincinnati Royals, Bulls, Bucks, 1970/1979)
Don Buse (Indiana Pacers, Phoenix Suns, Portland, Kansas City Kings, 1973/1976 ABA, 1977/1985 NBA)
Dennis Johnson (Seattle, Phoenix, Boston, 1977/1990)
Micheal Ray Richardson (Knicks, Warriors, Nets, 1979/1986)
Maurice Cheeks (Philadeplhia, Spurs, Knicks, Hawks, Nets, 1979/1993)
Derek Harper (Dallas, Knicks, Orlando, Lakers, 1984/1999)
John Stockton (Utah Jazz, 1985/2003)
Nate McMillan (Seattle, 1987/1998)
Mookie Blaylock (Nets, Hawks, Warriors, 1990/2002)
Gary Payton (Seattle, Milwaukee, Lakers, Boston, Miami, 1991/2007)
Eric Snow (Seattle, Philadelphia, Cavs, 1996/2008)
Chris Paul (Clippers, Rockets, 2006-2018+)
Jrue Holiday (Philadelphia, Pelicans, 2010-2018+)
Ricky Rubio (Minnesota, Utah Jazz, 2012-2018+)
Patrick Beverley (Rockets, Clippers, 2013-2018+)

Make your pick and explain why

[Gibson22]

My vote will probably go to Nate mcmillan again, but I wanna try to inform myself about jerry west and don buse before expressing my preference

[SinceGatlingWasARookie]

Nate McMillan is underated.

Michael Ray Richardson is also underated. Since I am more of a peaks guy I don't care about Richardson's short career. I also don't care if Richardson played some of his best games while high on cocaine. Richardson was lucky to survive playing basketball on cocaine.

I saw Buse but don't really remember him which makes me not inclined to vote for him. I should have remembered him if he was good but I missed his peak.

I am just happy to see Nate McMillan and Richardson on the list.

I met Nate McMillan and Dennis Johnson. Ball players must get so sick of irritating fans but Nate McMillan was nice. I had a lot of respect for McMillan's game but even while he was playing he wasn't being recognized. I remember young McMillan was playing a mature, smart hard working game on a less mature, less smart, mediocre young Sonics team. He was one of my favorite players because he did all the little things correctly. Maybe I liked McMillan because in Boston in the 1980s he was like my secret player. My fellow Celtic fans barely knew who McMillan was.

What I liked about Payton, Cheeks and Blaylock is how well they defended dribbles. If you want to stop Westbrook, or Kyrie Irving from dribbling past the defender who is better than Payton?

But was McMillan really a better defender than Gary Payton? McMillan was bigger. Are we favoring bigger players? Are we holding The fact that Payton got hyped against him?

[penbeast0]

Watching them, it looked like Payton was more disruptive; more PGs would back down the ball or deal it early so as not to have to deal with Payton's defense. However, advanced numbers imply that McMillan was the better defender. Maybe because having your PG dominate the ball isn't a good way to run an offense (unless you have Oscar Robertson, Magic Johnson, John Stockton, or Steve Nash?). From eye test, Payton was the most disruptive and that should have made him the best since he wasn't burned individually a lot either.

My alternative if someone convinces me is KC Jones because he is the only one I didn't really get to see with the eye test. I saw West from 69 to 73 and he was Dwyane Wade level which is great for an all-time great scorer but not as big an effect on opposing defenses as someone like peak Payton. KC was on the best defense of all time and was certainly a key part, but that defense was just as devastating with Cousy playing most of the minutes so I credit the great majority of it to Russell.

Vote: Payton (but willing to be convinced otherwise)

[PistolPeteJR]

It's West, than Payton at #4 for me. To be honest I thought West would go at #2, but nbd.

[Gibson22]

Nate McMillan is underated.

Michael Ray Richardson is also underated. Since I am more of a peaks guy I don't care about Richardson's short career. I also don't care if Richardson played some of his best games while high on cocaine. Richardson was lucky to survive playing basketball on cocaine.

I saw Buse but don't really remember him which makes me not inclined to vote for him. I should have remembered him if he was good but I missed his peak.

I am just happy to see Nate McMillan and Richardson on the list.

I met Nate McMillan and Dennis Johnson. Ball players must get so sick of irritating fans but Nate McMillan was nice. I had a lot of respect for McMillan's game but even while he was playing he wasn't being recognized. I remember young McMillan was playing a mature, smart hard working game on a less mature, less smart, mediocre young Sonics team. He was one of my favorite players because he did all the little things correctly. Maybe I liked McMillan because in Boston in the 1980s he was like my secret player. My fellow Celtic fans barely knew who McMillan was.

What I liked about Cheeks and Payton is how well they defended dribble. If you want to stop Westbrook, or Kyrie Irving from dribbling past the defender who is better than Payton?

But was McMillan really a better defender than Gary Payton? McMillan was bigger. Are we favoring bigger players? Are we holding The fact that Payton got hyped against him?

I don't know if he was better, but in my opinion I would say he was slightly better considering their whole career.

There are a number of guys that disturbed your dribble better than Nate, even a guy like patrick beverley is better in this aspect (that's the thing he does better on a basketball court).

Anyway, I think that payton is the best dribble defender, then cheeks and blaylock, and I was surprised to see Jason Kidd at the first spot, he was a genius help defender and really saw things first and anticipated the opposing team's move, but I think there are guys that had a bigger impact because they were capable of following you and closing the space on you every half a step you made.

At the same time, I already said that, in my opinion, those types of small defenders a la blaylock, as admirable as they are, can't really have a big positive impact on their defense, they aren't actually great defenders, they look like they are and they try to be great defenders, but they can only do so much, all things considered, especially in the most recent years/decades.

Now, gary payton obviously IS a great defender and absolutely isn't a small guy (even if he was 190 cm and not 193 as listed), in fact, he is a guy that I wouldn't have complained if he came up first, but yeah, If I had to chosose I would say that the combination of nate's abilities, an important one being his size, made him slightly more valuable than gary on the defensive end.

So yes, me, personally, you could say that I'm favoring bigger players.

And gary's defense declined in the second half of his career, even before 2000, for how I see it. Not that nate has more longevity, but, being a defensive ranking a lot more subjective that an overall player ranking, for GP, I actually saw him not defending like he did in his best years, while a lot of those guys in this list played don't have longevity because they played in older eras/because they were not that good, it's not their defense that declined.

But yeah, I think gp is almost certainly the goat PG on ball defender and he was not small, so he could be the right choice.

PS: are you voting anybody?

[eminence]

.

Hey Pen, could you give some rough overview of any memories of the Wali Jones/Van Lier/Buse trio? Not guys I've watched much of.

[SinceGatlingWasARookie]

I am voting Payton.
I am a little wary of voting for the most hyped defender but I think he might actually be the best. I am wary of voting for Cheeks because that might be me voting for my nostalgia.

A vote for Nate sort of makes me happy. If Nate MicMillan is coming up top in advanced stats then I want to see how advanced defensive stats are formed. If I like the formula for the advanced defensive stats then I might pick the advanced defensive stat choice over Payton because I don't have Payton ahead of the pack by all that much.

Van Lier is the only one of these guys that I don't have an opinion about them.

[PigsOnTheWing]

Unfortunately, I'm pretty busy right now, so the most I can do is voting once again for West, though I feel less and less confortable with him as my top pick. I hope I'll be able to make a more in-depth post about McMillan vs Payton vs Stockton in the next two days (probably Saturday), which is an interesting debate to me as they were basically contemporaries. Anyway, I copypaste my reasoning for West:

My other main candidate was Jerry West. I love him, after Steve Nash he is probably my favorite player of all time but this has nothing to do with why I think he deserves to be this high. We have almost no defensive numbers for him so from an impact perspective it's hard to make an evaluation. But from every video I've seen, he seems to be absolutely phenomenal. Great timing, quick hands, good positioning, I guess he was able to lock down others guards very often. But the thing that jumped out to me the most was his help defense and IQ. He was praised by his contemporaries for his ability to quarterback the defense (though the Lakers had never had good DRTG until Wilt came along). The impact studies like WOWYR paint him as super valuable and I'm sure a +7 impact wasn't possible only with great offense in that era with stricter dribbling rules. That's why he'll most likely earn my #2 vote. He falls short in overall value from Kidd because of worse longevity and a slightly lower peak.

[penbeast0]

.

Hey Pen, could you give some rough overview of any memories of the Wali Jones/Van Lier/Buse trio? Not guys I've watched much of.

I know Wali Jones from an outreach program he did with some of my kids and he is a smart, funny guy but frankly I don't remember him being a defensive stopper, just a decent defensive guard. Van Lier was sort of Gary Payton before Gary Payton, a fiery physical guy who liked to get right up in your face and was very strong for his height but could be burned that way as well. Buse was a guy with good size who played smaller than his height; smart with good positioning and got into the passing lanes; little offensive role so he could focus on defense heavily. Of the three, I'd probably go Buse/Van Lier/Jones but could see switching the first two without much difficulty.

[Gibson22]

Is there a way to make this project gain more partecipation? I tried to pm some members these days but I don't know

[penbeast0]

Defense is hard to judge when you haven't seen the players; offense can use stats. So, you only get the oldtimers and those who watch a lot of tape speaking with any confidence.

Also, the only PG with real "stans" on this board is Nash who isn't in any defensive conversations. You might get out the fans with serious one player love when you get the top SGs (Jordan and Kobe fans), SF (LeBron fans), PF (KG has the true advanced stat believers), or C (Hakeem and Russell).

If you feel the participation is too light or waning, you could cut it to top 5 also.

[trex_8063]

The exact number from 1962 to 1973 comes out at
Lakers with West (822 G): 116.9 ppg for, 111.9 ppg against
Lakers without West (151 G): 110.0 ppg for, 112.1 ppg against

fwiw, that's messy methodology. For one thing, there were fairly wild fluctuations in team and league-average pace between '62-'73. If you want to use WOWY to investigate for impact (defensive or otherwise), I think you need to look at individual year fluxes.

West rates out even worse in defensive WOWY on an individual season basis. From 62 to 73,
Season sum total change: -0.2 (which is what I had posted earlier)
Simple average of individual season changes: -0.1
Weighted average of individual season changes based on sample size: +0.1

Regardless of methodology, the Lakers' defense (in terms of opponent ppg) didn't change much with/without West's presence.
Combine this with the Lakers RS defense being mediocre and their PO defense being garbage pre Wilt and it's hard for me to see West as a top 3 defensive PG.

And for reference, West's WOWY for each individual season:

Code: Select all

Year   G (In)  For       Against   G (Out) For       Against
1962   75      118.91    116.36    5       112.80    115.80
1963   55      117.53    112.24    25      111.12    112.76
1964   72      110.85    109.14    8       99.13     104.50
1965   74      111.86    109.45    6       111.67    116.00
1966   79      119.68    116.39    1       102.00    114.00
1967   66      121.44    119.97    15      116.60    121.20
1968   51      125.16    116.29    31      114.65    114.39
1969   61      113.48    108.00    21      108.67    108.38
1970   74      114.64    111.50    8       105.50    114.13
1971   69      116.55    111.46    13      105.31    112.92
1972   77      121.70    108.65    5       109.80    109.40
1973   69      113.13    103.61    13      103.92    100.77
1974   31      109.32    108.03    24      107.88    108.88

Hmm. I don't want to draw solid conclusions from this as there is a whole host of other factors which may contribute to this trend (or rather lack thereof) which are not accounted for in WOWY data. Potential factors (not saying these are all actually present) I'm referring to:
*Lakers trended toward a slower-paced grind it out style when West was absent???
**What teammates were absent (or not) at the same time?
***What was the avg quality of offense (and average pace) faced in games with/without West (any notable differences?)?
****Were there any notable absences on the opposing teams creating discrepancies?

Nonetheless, this has given me pause wrt lending West my vote again. I may consider another candidate (Chris Paul, Mookie Blaylock, Mo Cheeks, or John Stockton likely the big contenders).

[trex_8063]

My vote will probably go to Nate mcmillan again, but I wanna try to inform myself about jerry west and don buse before expressing my preference

re: McMillan

He certainly might be one of the biggest per-minute impact defenders (maybe even #1) left on the table. In '97 his NPI DRAPM was +2.13; in '98 (his final season) his PI DRAPM was +2.25.
And we have rs-only APM for '94-'96 (no offense/defense splits, just overalls): he was 5th in the league in '94, 15th in '95, 103rd in '96. Knowing the kind of player that he was, it's a fair assumption that it was his impact on defense that comprised the lion's share of his relatively high marks (in '94 and '95, at least).

I'm still not going to lend him my vote on this round, though, because of consideration of total contributions: he played just a tad over 20,000 rs minutes in his whole career (12-year career---severely injured one year---25.7 career mpg avg)........there isn't anyone I'm presently considering who even played as little as 30,000 career minutes.
So even if I think McMillan was, on average, marginally better defensively per minute than Candidate X, I'll still probably lean toward Candidate X if he played >10,000 or 15,000 more minutes than McMillan.

I feel somewhat similarly wrt Eric Snow (another really strong per-minute candidate, but just a tad over 23,000 career minutes to his credit).

[Samurai]

Repeating my previous vote for Jerry West. Reasons copied from the previous thread:

Based solely on eye test, Jerry West impacted the game with his help defense more than any of the others listed here. A good part of this was his off-the-charts bball IQ. He was like having a second coach on the floor; his knowledge of the game took his defense beyond just a compilation of his physical skills. It was as if he seemed to know what the offense was going to do, and thus his anticipation just seemed to put him in the right position to anticipate a pass or drive. While I acknowledge that there may have been a few that were even better solely as a shutdown man-defender, his help defense at the guard position was GOAT-level. His defense is tremendously underrated by a lot of fans today, most of whom never actually saw him play live. As a result, Jerry West gets my vote. In 1970, Bill Russell stated that as great as West was on offense, he was actually an even better player on defense. He added that he didn't just view West as the best defensive guard in the game, he was the best defensive player. Of course, Russell had just retired so he wasn't necessarily implying that West was better on D than he was - just that he felt West was the best defensive player in the league now that he was no longer playing.

[kendogg]

Gotta start with saying that I still feel Jerry West is more of a SG-leaning combo guard than a PG-leaning combo guard despite others who feel differently. I feel like some folks are just looking at the listing at basketball-reference or how tall his backcourt mate is and deciding. I'm going by the eyeball test of how much he runs plays or just looks for his shot and passes if another teammate has a better opportunity (aka a SG, if talking about a combo guard IMO).

I would still say Dennis Johnson is a SG as well, though that one is also arguable since it is a pretty even split, but honestly more of his prime was at SG. He was kinda chubby during a chunk of his tenure with the Celtics. Also he guarded more SG's even when he played with Ainge. Nobody even responded to me on that one which I feel is going to be an issue soon when he comes up in the list.

From my previous vote:

I think if you are assessing the best defensive point guard, you value lock down defense the best as they are the first line of defense. Help defense is great and all but there are always 4 help defenders and there is only 1 guy guarding the ball. You also have to consider the strength of the era they played in. I do think there are some extremely good players from the 60's and 70's, but the average level of guard play in those eras is less than the modern era, especially in what I feel is the strongest overall era, the 90's.

Gary Payton is arguably the best lockdown PG defender in the strongest era. He guarded MJ, unquestionably a GOAT candidate and the only GOAT candidate who is a guard IMO, better than anyone. He has the hardware to prove his excellence (1 DPOY, 9x All Defense), but others can boast similar resumes. Walt Frazier is named here and is absolutely a lockdown defender, but he played IMO the weakest NBA era. Jason Kidd and Chris Paul are great all around defenders, but they aren't as dominating of a lockdown defender (Kidd because of less quickness, Paul because less length) than Frazier/Payton. And Payton/Frazier/Paul won the most first team all defense selections of any PG in history (by far). They range from 7-9 and the next best has 4 (Jason Kidd and several others, though Kidd has 5 2nd team selections).

The math seems pretty simple to me.

[Lost92Bricks]

Nate McMillan in 1994: 3.0 SPG in only 25.8 MPG.

I don't even know how that's physically possible.

[kendogg]

Nate McMillan in 1994: 3.0 SPG in only 25.8 MPG.

I don't even know how that's physically possible.

a guy who plays 20mpg for his career can't be in the top 5 sorry. he's not even in the top 20 SPG for his career.

[penbeast0]

Gotta start with saying that I still feel Jerry West is more of a SG-leaning combo guard than a PG-leaning combo guard despite others who feel differently.

Whether he is or not, and defensively it might be questionable even if offensively he's a pretty clear PG, the OP made it clear that he is going by B-R.com ratings and since it's his thread, West's ranking will be as a PG so vote for him where you think he ranks relative to these guys.

Oh, and I didn't go off size at all when I looked at his backcourt mates; I went off having watched the last part of his career, some film, and, to back that up, assist percentage relative to his backcourt partners as the best statistical determinant that we have at the moment.

[SinceGatlingWasARookie]

Nate McMillan in 1994: 3.0 SPG in only 25.8 MPG.

I don't even know how that's physically possible.

Gary Payton plays 82 games of 35 minutes a game in 1994. So about half of McMillan's minutes were at off guard that year.

The King of steals per minute seams to be Dudley Bradley but MicMillan is still high on the list.
Don Buse and his teammate Ronnie Lee are both high on the steals list.

The steals per minute leaders tend to be in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Not so much in the last few decades.