1 player impact on offense vs 1 player impact on defense

[rebirthoftheM]

Context is post merger NBA, though you can give different answers for different eras post-merger:

Q1: As a general rule, is the ceiling for 1 player (an elite offensive superstar) being able to lift an offense higher than 1 player being able to positively lift a defense (an elite defensive superstar)?

Q2: If so why? And generally speaking, how big is the gap between the two?

Q3: If their ceilings are both equal in your eyes all things being equal, care to point out examples that indicate this?

Q4: Who between the 2 can better mitigate offensive/defensive team issues stemming from poor quality coaching & poor quality teammates on the relevant end? How big is the gap?

Q5: The most elite defenders of all time impact wise are almost all bigs. Should smalls be punished in defensive comparisions to bigs? Or should defensive comparisons be weighted position wise?

Some examples I have in mind are MJ in the 80s, Lebron in early Cavs stint/'18 cavs, Kobe 06/07, Wade 09/10 & TMac 02-03 vs KG in Minny pre-04, Hakeem pre-rings & TD in general.

Raise other examples as you see fit.

I am interested in this matter to determine how we all value each side of the court in individual rankings of a player.

[lessthanjake]

1. Yes. But it’s not by a huge margin, if we are comparing the highest offensive impact to the defensive impact achieved by the best defensive big men.

2. The offense largely controls who is in the action. So they can have their best offensive player in every action, while the opposing team on offense can choose to avoid the best defensive player on the other team. This gets harder to avoid (or at least the cost of avoidance is higher) when we are talking about a big man protecting the rim, which is basically why the ceiling for big man defensive impact is higher than for other positions.

3. N/A, but I’d note that RAPM generally suggests the idea that the best big man defenders have defensive impact that’s fairly close to the offensive impact of the best offensive players.

4. The answer to this depends on what the team’s issues are. The most impact in many cases is going to just depend on which side of the ball the team is worse at—a great player will have more impact the worse their team is at something. Leaving that aside, offense is probably the answer, since bad coaching can probably more easily allow the defensive player to be schemed around than the offensive one (since the offensive one can still surely get the ball, and be in the actions).

5. Maybe, but then we should also do the opposite regarding offense (since bigs also tend to be worse offensively). Stuff should either not be measured relative to position at all, or it should all be measured that way. Mixing and matching will lead to undue bias in favor or against players. I tend to think it’s easier not to measure relative to position, because measuring relative to position requires an extra layer of analysis that could be flawed (i.e. figuring out what the position baselines are).

[penbeast0]

1. Yes. But it’s not by a huge margin, if we are comparing the highest offensive impact to the defensive impact achieved by the best defensive big men.

2. The offense largely controls who is in the action. So they can have their best offensive player in every action, while the opposing team on offense can choose to avoid the best defensive player on the other team. This gets harder to avoid (or at least the cost of avoidance is higher) when we are talking about a big man protecting the rim, which is basically why the ceiling for big man defensive impact is higher than for other positions.

3. N/A, but I’d note that RAPM generally suggests the idea that the best big man defenders have defensive impact that’s fairly close to the offensive impact of the best offensive players.

4. The answer to this depends on what the team’s issues are. The most impact in many cases is going to just depend on which side of the ball the team is worse at—a great player will have more impact the worse their team is at something. Leaving that aside, offense is probably the answer, since bad coaching can probably more easily allow the defensive player to be schemed around than the offensive one (since the offensive one can still surely get the ball, and be in the actions).

5. Maybe, but then we should also do the opposite regarding offense (since bigs also tend to be worse offensively). Stuff should either not be measured relative to position at all, or it should all be measured that way. Mixing and matching will lead to undue bias in favor or against players. I tend to think it’s easier not to measure relative to position, because measuring relative to position requires an extra layer of analysis that could be flawed (i.e. figuring out what the position baselines are).

(1) Agree with most of this but rim protection has been proportionally nerfed by the 3 point spacing revolution. They are still the most valuable defenders but not to the degree they were when the best shots were almost always the closest to the rim. Russell, for example, is probably the GOAT in terms of value weighted on only one side of the ball (LeBron, Jordan, or Magic on the offensive side).

(4) I will also guess, without any data to back it up, that a great defensive player tends to inspire teammates to also work and play that end, particularly if he is also a great defensive communicator. A great scorer can leave teammates standing around and not working as hard on that end which may be why many of the greatest offensive impact players were primarily playmakers not scorers because a great playmaker will tend to inspire the other offensive players to put more effort in knowing it will be rewarded with shots.

[Doctor MJ]

Context is post merger NBA, though you can give different answers for different eras post-merger:

Q1: As a general rule, is the ceiling for 1 player (an elite offensive superstar) being able to lift an offense higher than 1 player being able to positively lift a defense (an elite defensive superstar)?

Q2: If so why? And generally speaking, how big is the gap between the two?

Q3: If their ceilings are both equal in your eyes all things being equal, care to point out examples that indicate this?

Q4: Who between the 2 can better mitigate offensive/defensive team issues stemming from poor quality coaching & poor quality teammates on the relevant end? How big is the gap?

Q5: The most elite defenders of all time impact wise are almost all bigs. Should smalls be punished in defensive comparisions to bigs? Or should defensive comparisons be weighted position wise?

Some examples I have in mind are MJ in the 80s, Lebron in early Cavs stint/'18 cavs, Kobe 06/07, Wade 09/10 & TMac 02-03 vs KG in Minny pre-04, Hakeem pre-rings & TD in general.

Raise other examples as you see fit.

I am interested in this matter to determine how we all value each side of the court in individual rankings of a player.

So these are questions I was thinking I'd answer one at a time, but I realize my meandering ways would probably end up making my post redundant, so I'll just riff:

* I do think that in the modern game the ceiling of individual offensive impact is higher than that for defense.
* My basis for thinking in these terms has generally been anchored in the APM/RAPM data we've had. Here's some RAPM data from this year for example:

LA-RAPM 23/24

The data I see there seems to say that extreme offensive impactors have 50-100% more impact than extreme defensive impactors. That's greater than I remember. I'd tend to say something more like 25-50%.

* I do think in the deeper past, this wasn't true. Analytically it has to do with how extreme team outliers are on offense vs defense are on each side of the ball. Back in the days of Mikan & Russell, the bigger outliers tended to happen on defense, but then thing shifted. I'm afraid I can't find a good spreadsheet for it right now, but I want to say that this shift really began in the '80s.

* Presuming it's a real thing, what do I think caused it? Offenses trying new things until some stuff started working better against big man-led defense. The dominance on defense end up begetting an offensive response that swung the dominance in the other direction.

* What were those things? Pushing the bounds of dribbling rules, manipulating officiating, getting better at shooting further away from the basket, and attacking in transition, are the things that I'd tend to think of, though there's also a lot of incremental increase in scheme sophistication happening along the way...and of course, rule changes. Basketball today would be a drasticallly different sport had defensive goaltending not be disallowed.

* Incidentally I don't think the 3-point shot is what swung the NBA from defense-dominated to offense-dominated, it's just that once a certain level of comfort was reached at a distance that counted 150% as much as everywhere else, everything accelerating even further.

* As I say all of this, who knows?, maybe Wemby will end up having more defensive impact than we've ever seen anyone have offensive impact. It's always possible we're getting misled by the outlier talents we happen to witness, but it just makes sense to me that it's harder for a shot blocker to block 3's than layups.

* Who can better mitigate poor teammates and coaching? A scorer. When the team concept breaks down, the guy least affected is the one with the most selfish game.

* Punish smalls for lesser defense? Depends what you mean. What's definitely the case is that most of the guards with All-D accolades weren't actually serious contenders against bigs, and so I'd say we should take All-D accolades with a major grain of salt.

But if you're making use of regression data (like RAPM), there's no reason to do an additional league-wide adjustment based on positional label.

[SpreeS]

I always thought that individual offence >>> indv. defence, but Luka defence showed that the gap could be way smaller or it could be exception, b/c I have never seen so comical bad defence in 30y of watching Finals

[DraymondGold]

Great questions!

1. Value of offense vs defense
Generally I think an individual offense has a higher ceiling than individual defense.

People often assume potential value is roughly a 50-50 split of offense and defense. To me, potential value comes from three main categories, not two: scoring (offensive), creation (offensive), and defense (defensive), and it’s closer to 33-33-33 split than 50-50.

Put another way, on a random team, I’d rather have a player with great scoring and creation but neutral defense over a player with great defense but neutral scoring and creation. If you only get to have value in one area, I’m open to the idea that defense is most value, although there’s a ton of uncertainty. I wouldn’t disagree strongly if you argued perhaps potential value is closer to 30-30-40 than 33-33-33, but I would disagree if you thought it was 25-25-50 in favor of defense, at least in more modern eras.

Overall though, there's a ton of uncertainty when applying this kind of 'potential value' analysis, and team fit is going to be key if you're trying to decide whether to addd a player with playmaking vs defense vs scoring. To me, it's much more important to look at the actual skills and abilities of the player you're analyzing. But I would be careful assuming Player A with good defense and scoring but potentially neutral or negative creation is better than Player B with better scoring and good playmaking but potentially neutral defense (just because Player A is a "two-way player"). There can be real synergistic value in the ability to score and create (note: there's many ways to create, both on ball and off-ball) at the same time.

2. Why?
Let’s break things up into Offensive and Defensive Volume and Efficiency.

As jake suggested, offensive volume exceeds defensive volume. Put another way, the number of possessions where an offensive player helps their team score outweighs the number of possessions where a defensive player helps the opposing team not score. There are clear reasons why: an offense is more proactive (they determine what plays to run, who gets the ball, etc.) while a defense is more reactive (they have to respond to what the other team does). Obviously one is not 100% proactive/reactive — an offense makes a play of what to run based on the defensive scheme, and the defense can be aggressive in e.g. attacking offensive weaknesses. But this asymmetry remains.

There’s data to support this! Quoting myself:
“Per thinking basketball's study of the 2011 season, centers have the highest average defensive usage at 22.4%, almost twice as much as the average point guard defensive usage at 12.6%. (source 1: https://elgee35.wordpress.com/2011/02/06/defensive-usage-ii/, source 2: https://elgee35.wordpress.com/2011/01/22/defensive-usage/).” Compare this to the highest offensive usage during that timespan, which is 34%, and we can clearly see the larger volume for offensive players (source 3: https://elgee35.wordpress.com/2011/01/22/defensive-usage/).

If you want to disagree with this study, you’d likely need to argue either:
a) The flaws of usage bias the results. Usage is an imperfect stat: it often misses subtler forms of impact, such as off-ball creation (e.g. spacing/gravity) on offense or intimidation (e.g. having a player not drive into the paint due to a good rim protector) on defense. But I haven’t found clear evidence that the subtler forms of defense outweigh the subtler forms of offense.
b) Defenders make up for their volume disadvantage with an advantage in efficiency. For example, even if the best offensive players help 1.5x as many offensive possessions as the best defensive players help defensive possessions, the defensive player might reduce opponent efficiency by 2x as much as the offensive players help their team’s efficiency. But… I haven’t seen evidence to supports this. When we look at tracking data, we can see how much opponent efficiency is reduced when defended by a certain player. This data is super noisy, even among the best defenders. Given the noise of the data (which suggests the signal is weak) and given the lack of outlier values among larger timespans (which are needed to pick up the signal)… it seems unlikely that defenders make up for their clear volume disadvantage with a massive efficiency advantage.
c) This is an era-specific trend. The sample isn’t as large as we would want: it’s just in 2011. I absolutely believe the proportion of potential offensive and defensive value changes in different eras. For example, in the 60s before the 3 point line, defensive volume for rim protectors might be higher (because of the decreased spacing and increased focus on mid-range/post-up offense > distance shooting), and so defensive value might be higher. But by the time we get a 3 point line and more spacing, I would bet the defensive volume decreases enough for individual defense to have less potential value than individual offense. Other rule and style changes may also play a role (see Doc's excellent post above).

3. What evidence is there?

Offensive and Defensive RAPM splits certainly agree that individual offense has more value than individual defense in recent times.

Modern RAPM:
-Offensive RAPM samples over +7: 4 > Defensive RAPM samples over +7: 0
-Offensive RAPM samples over +6: 19 > Defensive RAPM samples over +6: 4
-Offensive RAPM samples over +5: 50 > Defensive RAPM samples over +5: 21
Source: Goldstein RAPM (one of the two standard sources for RAPM from 1997–2019)

Historical RAPM:
-Offensive RAPM samples over +7: 2 > Defensive RAPM samples over +7: 0
-Offensive RAPM samples over +6: 11 > Defensive RAPM samples over +6: 0
-Offensive RAPM samples over +5: 24 > Defensive RAPM samples over +5: 0
Source: Squared2020 RAPM (1970/80/85/88/91/93/96). Note: incomplete data and different scaling from modern RAPM.

Now there is some uncertainty in total RAPM, and in the offensive/defensive splits. But this data pretty universally suggests offense is more valuable in than defense.

Official WOWY sources don’t list the offensive/defensive splits, but a small survey of the top players also seems to support that individual offense may have a higher ceiling than individual defense. Let’s look at a sample of some of the usual GOAT offensive / defensive players
according to their official Prime WOWY score:

Spoiler:

0. [Curry would be 1st all-time if we included data since 2016]
1. Oscar (pre-merger)
2. West (pre-merger)
3. Nate Thurmond (pre-merger)
4. Garnett
5. Walton (mid-merger)
6. LeBron
7. Shaq
8. Nash
9. Bird
10. Hakeem
12 Magic
13 Robinson 4.7
21 Duncan
24 Russell (pre-merger)
32 Jordan
85 Ewing
114 Wilt (pre-merger)
[note: missing data on Mutombo, although we know he’s outside the top 10]

Now remember, WOWY is one of the nosiest stats in existence, and raw WOWY can have miss context and be biased by samples (like lineup changes). Notice, however, that the great offensive players seem to be generally ranked higher than the great defensive players (offensive players are ranked: 0, 1, 2, 6, 7, 8, 9, 12, 32; defensive players are ranked: 4, 5, 10, 13, 21, 24, 85, 114). So in just a cursory examination of ranks, this seems to favor offense.

Also note that many of the so-called defensive players likely also gain value from their offense. Most people would consider Garnett, Hakeem, Robinson, and Duncan’s Offense clearly over Curry, Nash, Bird, and Magic’s defense. Yet the one-way offensive players look equal, if not better, than the two-way defensive players. If our prior is correct, that suggests the defensive component of those all-time defensive players is less valuable than the offensive component of those all-time offensive players.

If we go to superior stats like adjusted WOWY (or ‘WOWYR’, which is like an Adjusted WOWY in the same way RAPM adjusts raw plus/minus), we get a qualitatively similar conclusion re: offense vs defense, although the exact rankings definitely shift around. Overall, it’s a cursory study, but WOWY data seems to support the idea that ceiling for individual offense may slightly exceed the ceiling for individual defense.

…

4. Who’s better at floor raising?
Generally I would say the more valuable player would likely be the better in the worse situation, so probably offense. If you mean in some sort of reverse-scalability sense, e.g. who retains a greater percentage of their value specifically in a floor-raising worse-teammate scenario, I’d be less confident, but still might lean offense.

Strong team defense often requires more of a complete defensive lineup. Having just one or two players that are clear defensive liabilities might be more harmful than having one or two players that are clear offensive liabilities.

Teams can target mismatches or attack defensive weaknesses on different areas of the floor from where the team's best defender is. If an opposing team generates a defensive breakdown, and the defensive liability isn't good enough to communicate, that could make it harder for the defending team to recover and the offense usually gets a high-quality shot. For example, just look at Gobert. He's probably one of the 10 best defenders of the century, but during his time with the Jazz, he had such porous perimeter defenders that his team struggled in the playoffs.

That's not to say offensive floor raising can cover all offensive liabilities. Having a lack of offensive threats on a team can make it easier for defenses to double-team or hone in on the weaknesses of an offensive player. If an offensive star puts more emphasis on creation, having poor finishers (or at least poorer finishing in smaller playoff samples) can definitely put a damper on your team offense (e.g. maybe 2024 Nuggets with Jokic vs Timberwolves?). If an offensive star is more of a scorer/finisher, having a lack of creation can also limit team results (e.g. 1977 Kareem in the playoffs, when his team lacked creation/ball-handling). This isn't at all meant to be a critique of those players -- both had absolutely fantastic seasons! Moreso a recognition that there are limits to what a reasonable offensive player can do given teammates.

But even so, there are certain styles of offensive floor raising that can do a lot with poorer lineups. Strong volume scoring packages can often still add a ton of lift to sub-optimal offensive teammates (e.g. 1962 Wilt, some years for 80s Jordan, some years for LeBron, etc.), even if there are still reasonable limitations to how much a star player can do with an imperfect cast.

5. Positional Evaluation on Defense
Indeed, bigs tend to have more defensive value than perimeter players! This comes naturally out of my earlier framework of analyzing defense in terms of volume and efficiency. In short, while big-man man defense might not be any more valuable than perimeter man defense, their team defense likely is. They provide help defense for the most valuable spot on the court (the rim), which is still the most valuable part of the court today. And since it's the most valuable part of the court, they're able to provide help defense more frequently than perimeter players (e.g. it's easier for a big on the left side to shift over and provide help defense for a guy driving to the rim on the right side, than it is for a perimeter player on the left side of the 3 point line to shift over to provide help defense for a guy about to get an open 3 on the right side). I explored this in a little more detail here:

Spoiler:

https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?p=99302617#p99302617

I agree with a lot of what's been said before. Is guard defense unimportant? Of course not. But that still doesn't mean that individual guard defense is as important as big man defense.

As I see it, there's two reasons.
1. Even Today, the most valuable shot is at the rim (though 3 point shots have clearly become the 2nd most valuable).
Evidence: If we look at points per field goal attempt in the 2022 regular season, we find the average team's points per field goal attempt from 3 is 1.06 points per attempt, while the average team's points per field goal attempt from less than 10 feet is 1.17 points per attempt (source: https://www.nba.com/stats/teams/shots-general/?Season=2021-22&SeasonType=Regular%20Season&sort=TEAM_NAME&dir=1&GeneralRange=Less%20Than%2010%20ft). If we look at shots closer to the rim, the points per attempt would go even higher.

Takeaway: Big men who provide rim protection still protect the most valuable spot on the floor.

2. Even today, there are more attempts at the rim than any other spot on the court.

One way to think of this is defensive volume, or defensive usage. Because there's more shots at the rim than any other single spot on the court, big man have a higher defensive volume than perimeter defenders.

Per thinking basketball's study of the 2011 season, centers have the highest average defensive usage at 22.4%, almost twice as much as the average point guard defensive usage at 12.6%. (source 1: https://elgee35.wordpress.com/2011/02/06/defensive-usage-ii/, source 2: https://elgee35.wordpress.com/2011/01/22/defensive-usage/).

If we look at the top 50 Players in the NBA this season in number of field goal attempts defended per game (minimum 40 games played), we find 24/50 are big men (either true centers or center-forward hybrids), while only 14 are guards (either true guards or guard-forward hybrids). (Source: https://www.nba.com/stats/players/defense-dash-overall/?sort=D_FGA&dir=1&Season=2021-22&SeasonType=Regular%20Season&CF=GP*G*40).

A simple way to think about this is that there's only one rim, while the 3 point line is ~84 feet long (if I remember correctly?). It's a lot easier for one player to defend 1 rim -- it's a lot harder for one player to defend the full 84 foot-long perimeter of the 3 point line.

Simply put, big men defenders have a far greater defensive volume on average. When you combine the volume advantage with Point 1 Above (rim attempts are the most efficient / valuable shot in basketball), it's clear that individual big men defenders are more impactful than individual perimeter players.

...

A few qualifiers:
1. Individual big men defenders are more valuable than individual perimeter defenders on average, but that doesn't necessarily mean there aren't perimeter defender outliers who have the impact of a big man. I'd love to see how the most valuable perimeter defender stacks up!
2. Individual perimeter defense is more valuable now than ever before, and it looks like that value's only going up. I guess we'll see how high it peaks.
3. Because of switching defenses and 3 point shooting, being a poor perimeter defender is a greater liability than ever before. This becomes even more important in the playoffs, when teams hunt defensive weaknesses. This can put a dent in the resilience of individual rim protectors if they're liabilities on the perimeter. Note: the same can be true for perimeter defenders who are poor rim protectors. Players like Giannis, Embiid, and Jokic will feast on smaller defenders. Overall, versatility is at an all time premium.

An interesting followup question might be: is overall team perimeter defense more valuable than overall team rim protection? This might be a way to balance the Defensive Volume/Usage advantage that individual big men have over perimeter defenders. In other words, are all 2–3 perimeter defenders on a team more valuable than all 1–2 rim protectors? This is sort of like comparing the defensive strategies of the Bulls (who prioritize perimeter defense) vs the defensive strategies of the Bucks (who prioritize rim protection). I'm not sure which is right, but it's certainly a lot closer!

However, I wouldn't penalize smalls any more than their impact suggests. Something like RAPM or adjusted WOWY would show their value relative to an average nba player, agnostic of position (although it can be affected by your situation/role), and going to some sort of position-relative analysis would only make the best perimeter defenders appear more valuable (although it would make the best perimeter offensive players be less valuable).

One thing to note: even if perimeter defense is on average less valuable than big man defense (see e.g. impact metrics like defensive RAPM vs position; team results e.g. the number of all-time defenses with bigs vs the number of all-time defenses with perimeter players)... perimeter defense still plays a critical role in defensive ceiling raising. There really is a limit to how much a defensive big can floor raise a team defense without other good defenders on the team.

There's an argument that perimeter defense is more resilient than big man defense in the modern era. I'm not sure how convincing it is, but it's interesting to ponder, so let's get into it! Note by resilient, I'm talking about the relative change in your postseason value relative to your regular season average, not the total value. So a resilient perimeter defender might have their defense go from +1.25 in the regular season to +1.5 in the playoffs, while a big without resilience might have their defense go from +2.5 to +2.25 in the playoffs. The big might still be overall more valuable, but team defense might become more positionally egalitarian in the playoffs.

What evidence is there?
1) Playoff plus minus. There's a great series of articles on thinking basketball looking at playoff plus minus data. In Part 3 (https://thinkingbasketball.net/2021/07/10/playoff-plus-minus-part-iii-changes-in-the-postseason/), he notices that big man value has declined the most in the playoffs of any position. The trend began around roughly the rule change in ~2005, and accelerated around the playstyle change in ~2016. Some qualifiers:
-It's a very noisy trend, far from from deterministic (e.g. just because the value of a position goes down on average doesn't mean all players must follow that trend).
-It's unclear how much of this is from offensive vs defensive changes.
-It's unclear how much this is era-specific. Were we just lacking strong all-time bigs during this time period? The trend reverses in the dead-ball era from ~ 97-04. How would it look if we had data from earlier, and will it look different in the coming decade?

2) Team-level performance. I won't go into too many details, but if you look at the best team defensive performances in the regular season vs the playoffs, you'll notice the percentage of teams with all-time perimeter defenders goes up clearly and the percentage of teams with all-time big man defenders goes down slightly. This is a trend looking at team performance across NBA history, so it's not necessarily era-specific (although I haven't looked into trends across era to be sure).
Happy to provide the data if people want!

Why?
There could be a lot of explanations.
-It could be that, at least in certain eras, perimeter defense is more resilient than big man defense. For example, having a good defensive big who's a liability when defending perimeter players might be more harmful than having a small who's a liability when defending big players. There's certainly film I could point to in the recent era that might support this.
-Both of the above analyses are noisy, and not necessarily conclusive. It could be noise.
-It could be that defensive floor raising in general becomes less viable in the playoffs. If you're an All-time defensive big but the only strong defender on you're team, you may be able to lead an all-time / strong defensive team performance in the regular season, but this becomes less viable in the playoffs when teams hyper-focus on attacking weaknesses. Thus, defense becomes more egalitarian in the playoffs, which just so happens to boost the defensive value of smalls.

Not sure exactly where I fall on this range of explanations (and there could be more that I missed), but it's interesting to think about!

[ShotCreator]

Short-term(e.g. playoff series), defense scales much higher.

Study the 99 playoffs(Robinson), 19 ECSF(Embiid), 16 Finals(LeBron). Those are the 3 that stick out the most for me.


A single defender can enable an entire scheme, and therefore change the entire psychology of the game and have insanely large impact that just doesn’t show up in the box score. I haven’t seen offensive series where a guy was literally the difference between GOAT and WOAT on-court performance simultaneously like I have with defense.


People forget the game is literally 100% binary. There is no what’s more important, because offense and defense mean the same things on the court.

However, if you look at the history of the game, defense-only teams rein supreme. I don’t think the league has ever seen an offense-only team(meaning bad defensive team), win a title.

Not that’s it’s impossible, but it’s clearly extremely hard. OTOH, Russell, Duncan, Wallace, Robinson, and Garnett won numerous titles because of teams with completely skewed defensive performances.

[An Unbiased Fan]

Individual offense >>>> Individual defense
Team defense >>> Individual offense

[penbeast0]

Individual offense >>>> Individual defense
Team defense >>> Individual offense

When you say "Team defense" are you basically saying "Help defense" or are you only saying that adding 5 players together gives a larger effect than any single player?

[An Unbiased Fan]

Individual offense >>>> Individual defense
Team defense >>> Individual offense

When you say "Team defense" are you basically saying "Help defense" or are you only saying that adding 5 players together gives a larger effect than any single player?

I'm talking about how the team plays defense as a unit. It's communication, help, rotations.

[penbeast0]

Individual offense >>>> Individual defense
Team defense >>> Individual offense

When you say "Team defense" are you basically saying "Help defense" or are you only saying that adding 5 players together gives a larger effect than any single player?

I'm talking about how the team plays defense as a unit. It's communication, help, rotations.

So, are you saying the best single person defenders who quarterback the defense generally have bigger impact than the best offensive players (who quarterback the offense)? I just want to be clear.