AStark1991 wrote:Djoker wrote:That's a good list because no one on there ever made an All-Defensive team.
Shawn Kemp - very good defender. Good leaper, quick feet, tough guy to beat for most opposing PF's. A little overzealous in terms of helping and not always making great reads.
Rasheed Wallace - elite defender. A total beast on defense. He should (would) have a bunch of selections if not for some insane competition at his position. He's definitely a top 5/10 defender in the league kind of guy for probably close to a decade.
Kenyon Martin - very good defender but undersized. Better awareness than Kemp but still a bit reckless at times.
Jermaine O'Neal - borderline elite defender for a few years with Indy. He was a big reason for why they were so good in 2003 and 2004. Flew under the radar then and now is never mentioned. Definitely could have made some all D teams.
Aaron Gordon - very good defender. Less undersized than Kenyon so he gets an edge over him.
If I had to rank them:
Rasheed > Jermaine > Kemp > Gordon > Martin
The top 2 is very clear to me with Sheed 1 JO 2. Kemp/Gordon/Martin can probably be shuffled any which way. These three guys were good defenders but never top in the league material IMO.
Admittedly I'm biased being a lifelong Seattle area resident and former Sonic season ticket holder, but I honestly think The Reign Man was on equal footing with Rasheed and Jermaine when strictly talking about defense. At his peak (1995-96) Kemp was 2nd in the league in defensive rating, 4th in defensive win shares, and 3rd in total rebounds. Additionally, after he left Seattle, the team dropped from 6th to 10th in overall collective defensive rating while Cleveland instantly became the #1 rated defensive unit in the league during his first season with the Cavs. Gary Payton seems to receive most (if not all) of the credit for why those Seattle teams were so great on defense, but I think the fact that they got worse defensively after Kemp left and Cleveland immediately became the top rated defense upon his arrival is irrefutable proof that he was just as essential to Seattle's defensive success as Payton was. I think the trio of Kemp, Rasheed, and Jermaine are pretty interchangeable when ranking their respective defensive impacts. Of the three, Kemp was the best rebounder as well as being the most athletic and switchable, Rasheed was the best man-to-man post defender, and Jermaine was the best shot blocker/rim protector. Martin and Gordon were great as well, but I completely agree about them being the bottom two. I view both of them as being very athletic and versatile defenders but not really elite at any particular aspect. Classic cases of being good at everything but great at nothing.
At the margin I’d argue if you’re going to come pretty hard claims in favor of one particular guy
I think the fact that they got worse defensively after Kemp left and Cleveland immediately became the top rated defense upon his arrival is irrefutable proof that he was just as essential to Seattle's defensive success as Payton was
… after one response … it might have made more sense to just make that case up front. That might just be me though.
My gut level, not consulting the data instinct would be broadly in line with the first response. Rasheed and O’Neal as the top tier, then the rest with K-Mart maybe lower than the other two. But to do this properly I’d want to look properly at data and tightly define the question etc.
On Kemp and the case for Kemp.
DWS and Reference Drtg are just are you on a good defensive team and are you defensively productive. That Kemp was those things isn’t in question.
The questions or doubts might be about his defensive IQ, the cost of his fouls direclty, the cost of his foul trouble (putting teams into the bonus and the way fouls limited his minutes) and how better defensive metrics (such as the impact family) would look upon him (though overlap with his defensive apex and play-by-play era is probably fairly limited).
On the quote noted above and below
I think the fact that they got worse defensively after Kemp left and Cleveland immediately became the top rated defense upon his arrival is irrefutable proof that he was just as essential to Seattle's defensive success as Payton was
… it just isn’t. Not that it’s not a good indicator that he was a good defender. Nor that that is precluded. But it’s nothing like a like-for-like controlled comparison. It might be the case that keeping Kemp and trading Payton for Baker-level defense equivalent would have seen Seattle’s defense drop to 29th … or maybe they improve … but irrefutable proof is a very high bar and you really aren’t doing anything to establish Payton’s impact at that time, even if Kemp’s impact were made clear by those team performance changes.
Moving beyond the somewhat overreaching claim, we can look at the Cavaliers and Sonics movements as a positive for Kemp but look closer to see how it fits with him being a primary driver versus him being a piece in a good defense. On the Cavs they aren’t noticeably different with him on or off and indeed for the core rotation there aren’t too many huge shifts – Person, Sura and Ferry look weaker; Potapenko and Anderson look stronger.
The area of greatest strength – at least in terms of rank - is turnover generation, as it had been a year earlier. This might push some credit towards Knight (and whilst he gives some stuff up in other areas, his long-term impact profile, iirc did suggest him as a strong defender) and/or Fratello as the major source of continuity.
Kemp being part of good and very good defenses speaks well to his performance but this doesn’t seem to be evidence toward a clear case of him driving it. Similarly, glancing at Seattle 1994-1997 I don’t think he was ever first or second on the team in on-off (McMillan-Pierce; McMillan-Perkins; Perkins-Payton; Payton-Schrempf (Schrempf narrowly ahead of McMillan). Those are net so include offense as well and are noisy but him never being a clear on-off leader suggests either other players as greater drivers and/or an ensemble more than supporting Kemp.
On Seattle too I think the idea of Payton as a singular driver is probably less popular here than elsewhere. There’s an awareness that through the mid-90s – on limited (+/- derived) data, McMillan might look the strongest Supersonic defensively. I’d also suspect Karl deserves a chunk of the credit given he tended to improve teams (two significant in-season changes of fortune for Seattle and Denver).
On the Seattle departure side I’d be as reticent to credit Kemp’s loss for the defensive fall as I would to credit Baker as an offensive upgrade on him for the offensive … ahem … boom (too strong a term, but used for the pun ….).
Mostly at the out rungs defensive players McIlvaine, McMillan, Wingate, Ehlo, Snow (and maybe role-player version Cummings and Larry Stewart as hustle players) see their minutes down or are departed in 1998.
Whilst I’d consider Greg Anthony a defensive addition, the largest minutes incomer is Dale Ellis. Very much an offensively slanted player.
Of course it depends where one comes out on the other players in the comparison too.
And this isn't an anti-Kemp post. In concert with his offensive production I think he was a very good player who was an important part of good teams and whose production held up well in the playoffs (perhaps marginally helped by his longest runs being in his prime, but I think it's also accurate without that caveat). It's just
at first glance my impression is he isn't up there with a couple of the other cited players as a defender.
