Curmudgeon wrote:mojomarc wrote:Mean_Streets wrote:It should be used with context.
You could have a good defensive rating if you are an average defensive player, but just happen to play with a bunch of elite defenders.
You think Bird is ever going to lead the league in Defensive Rating with the defensive talent Pippen had around him in 1995?
I think this illustrates the problem with defensive statistics, but maybe in the opposite way you are thinking. Bird was an exceptional team defender. He wasn't a lock-down individual defender unless he was massively motivated (and that was pretty rare tbh) but I don't think I've ever seen anyone who was better at reading the game defensively and making key defensive plays off the ball. He averaged 1.7 steals per game over his career (even though he rarely just stripped the ball from people). he was instead playing a very smart free safety in a way that really disrupted opposition teams' entire schemes. Not sure what the best stats are to really examine this to measure his impact, but I would be willing to bet if someone has a good dataset of Bird on the floor with everyone else healthy vs. Bird off the floor with everyone else healthy would be pretty significant. He after all led the team in his prime in DWS on teams with more acclaimed individual defensive players like Dennis Johnson and Robert Parish.
The best defenders on those Celtics teams were Dennis Johnson and Kevin McHale. Parish was good too, but McHale was better. Bird was a smart player but could not defend quicker forwards one on one. He didn't have the lateral mobility.
Maybe Johnson and McHale were the two best defenders. But the advanced stats do not demonstrate this. For the 86 team, Bird led the team in both defensive winshares and (with the exception of Bill Walton) and DBPM. Based on DBPM, the best defender outside of Bird and Walton was Danny Ainge. Same for 1985, where Johnson was 6th in DPOY but finished at dead zero for DBPM, and his defensive win shares were 4th on the team. And for 84 (I started at 86 and worked backwards
)--Bird led the entire league in defensive win shares and his DBPM was best on teh team while Johnson was third and McHale was in negative territory. And while Bird was rarely a leading shotblocker, he consistently led that team in steals and it wasn't terribly close.
Which goes back to my point: maybe there is more to defense than the idea you have to be a lock down defender, and maybe being a good defender in a team scheme is significantly more important than being seen as an elite lockdown defender.
I think there is too much interdependence of players on defense to come up with an individual defensive rating that really means something. Bill Russell might have been an exception had they tracked the same data when he played, but he's the only one I can think of.
Maybe. But that was also a strong defensive team up and down the roster. Just arbitrarily picking the 62 win 1964-65 team, you see Russell as clearly the dominant defensive win share guy, but they had five other guys that were 4.2 or better. But Russell definitely has the lock on the top of the leaderboard all time. He has six of the top 10 single season, with Chamberlain coming in 7th and 8th and then the only modern player in the top 10, Ben Wallace.
Interestingly enough, Bird has six placements in the top 250 all time single season Defensive Win Shares. Michael Jordan, who many consider a massively better defender, has eight. And Bird's two best seasons (he swaps places with another PF everyone considers a significantly better defender, Tim Duncan) are both ten spots higher than Jordan's best individual season.
So whatever Bird was doing, defensive win shares loved him far more than his reputation would lead one to believe.
