rich316 wrote:Wiggles, I want to respond here because I really like where you've taken this thread. I've been with the uninformed majority who believed Bird was a below-average defender for a while, but you've shown pretty convincingly here that he was at least above-average. I think you're off when you claim he has an argument for top-20 all time defensive forward, though.
wigglestrue wrote:Is it usually a good sign for a Player Comparisons thesis when you can keep diving into bkref and keep finding new angles to demonstrate how much you're right?
Question: Who are the greatest defensive forwards of all time? This is actually a pretty easy question to answer objectively, as long as we tinker with a few heuristics. There are only so many reliable ways for us to measure defensive greatness, anyhow.
Objective· All-Defensive Team selections (nothing pre-1969)
· Defensive Player of the Year voting (nothing pre-1983)
· Defensive Win Shares (fairly reliable in the shot-clock era)
· Defensive Rating (fairly reliable in the shot-clock era)
· Steals (nothing pre-1974)
· Blocks (nothing pre-1974)
· Defensive Rebounds (not separated out until 1974)
I think your methodology here is a little weak. All-D selections are notoriously prone to favoritism of big names and players with all-around reputations, not necessarily the best defenders. Did Kobe in 2011 contribute more defensive value than, say, Thabo Sefalosha? Most would say not, but the All-D team says yes. I'm skeptical that the basketball media of the 1980's was any less vulnerable to this kind of bias than their contemporaries.
Yes, but now, couldn't they have been biased
against Bird after some time precisely because he was well-known, since what his defense became reknowned (inaccurately) as was "subpar"? Once that "common wisdom" took hold, he stopped being named to the team. (Danny Vranes was a better defender than Bird in 1985?) Bird deserved more not fewer selections, in all likelihood.
DPOY voting tends to more accurately reflect reality, but it is not immune to the same issues. I was unable to find data on Bird's placement in any DPOY votes, I'd be curious to see how he did there.
Dws and Drtg are your best arguments here. Bird rates very high indeed in these metrics. I'm not sure that they are really giving us an accurate picture, though. I believe that good stats mostly confirm what we already know through the eye test, and reveal a few things that cognitive biases may have obscured. By the "eye test," I mean a comprehensive viewing of a large body of a player's work on the court, not a compilation of youtube highlights. Pippen, Jordan, Lebron, and Artest all rank lower than Bird in Drtg. Does the eye test tell us that those guys are lesser perimeter defenders than Bird? I definitely don't think so. Bird is ranked 26th in Dws, and Andre Iguodala is ranked 138th. Is Larry Bird that much better of a defender than Iguodala? I don't think so. Something is going on here that's throwing in significant statistical noise in favor of Bird. It could be the fact that most of Bird's defensive value derived from his massive edge in IQ, where as most truly elite defenders use their athleticism along with IQ to frustrate offenses. IQ doesn't go away with age and injury, so it was always there throughout Bird's career. Pippen, Jordan, and Artest are being hurt because their defense fell off from their elite peaks as age slowed them down. Lebron is being hurt because he just wasn't good at defense in his early years. Bird should get credit for his consistency, but I believe that it means his peak was nowhere near an elite level.
"Lesser perimeter defenders" is not the right standard. The right standard should be overall defensive value, no? Overall defense, anyway, not just one aspect of defense. Again, it is commonly assumed that to be a truly great point guard a player should be a good enough dribbler to be able to beat a good defender off the dribble and should have some measure of three-point range. And yet, few would dispute that Magic is an all-time great PG -- the absolute best ever, in fact! Same thing with Bird. It doesn't actually matter if he was a mediocre or merely decent one-on-one defender, as long as the offensive possession is disrupted enough to make the other team miss or turn the ball over often enough. That's literally all that matters on defense, ultimately, right? Just like the only real goal on offense is putting the ball in the hoop at a rate that will win you the game, the only real goal on defense is keeping the ball out of the hoop and back into your hands at a rate that will win you the game. Bird helped do that, better than everyone who's ever played except for about 25-50 other players. That's what the advanced stats say, that's what his accolades suggest, and that's what
my eye test confirms. His team defense is out-of-this-world good. It is capital-G
Great. The question is then not, "Does lacking in this or that aspect of What We Think Of As Good Defense somehow disqualify him from greatness if there are other players who were far better at that aspect?" That'd be like ranking Mark Price ahead of Magic because Price was a consummate shooter "as a point guard should be", no? A guard or a defender doesn't have to do any one particular thing very well to be great. But hey, Bird
is great, as we can see, at a lot of what constitutes the act of playing defense in basketball. Not just the intellectual side of things. He is even quite athletic, his athleticism belied by his not necessarily needing to exercise much of it to get the job done, and his athleticism actually being on display in aspects of the concept overlooked in favor of the less subtle ones, i.e., his quickness (regardless of whether it depended more on mental acuity or physical reflexes) was extraordinary. He might have had the Quickest Hands in Basketball History, and his hand-eye coordination was also extraordinary, even for a pro basketball player, and this is not merely a "skill" this is a part of his physis, he was born with some of it, and it belongs under the domain of athleticism, and his was also perhaps the Best Hand-Eye Coordination in Basketball History. And those two athletic traits matter a metric ****load to playing defense. He could harass opponents and "gamble" better than most because of those two traits, he was quicker than his opponents, he was far more able to reach for a steal or block without fouling, and he could do this without exerting himself to the max. Sometimes he only looks unathletic because he simply doesn't have to try that hard to get the job done (doesn't take much athleticism to just extend an arm and rip) and what he was tasked to do on defense didn't usually require max athleticism. Ted Williams doesn't need to have been a racehorse on the basepaths to be an all-time great batter. Tom Brady doesn't need to run as well as a halfback or throw bombs accurately in order to be an all-time great QB. Larry Bird doesn't need great or even good lateral or vertical explosiveness to be a great defender.
I think you have a point with steals and blocks. Bird was able to make amazing plays because he had such great intelligence for the game. The phrase "playing chess while everybody else was playing checkers" applies here. He could predict with a high rate of success when the ball was going to swing to his man from the other side of the floor, or when a posting big man was going to use his drop-step. His ability to make highly intelligent gambles means that his box-score defensive stats are probably more valuable than from a guy like Iverson, who clearly lost as many gambles as he won.
wigglestrue wrote:Subjective
· Game footage
· Intuitive reasoning
Anyone want to sort those objective categories by number of selections/votes and amount of black/grey ink, weigh the various things reasonably against each other, and then sort whatever descending list of players you happen to come up with by position, either the traditional five positions or a more generalized positional breakdown? If no one feels like doing that, I will. I'll enjoy going one-by-one, forward-by-forward, deciding on the objective merits and a little well-reasoned qualitative analysis. But hey, off the top of my head, let's see how many forwards or small forwards would right now almost certainly be assumed (perhaps mistakenly, in some cases) to be a more valuable overall defensive presence than Bird. (Power forwards in italics. Players who were variously SF/PF a la Bird in half-and-half.)
· Tim Duncan (unless you view him as a misnamed center)
· Ron Artest
· LeBron James (if Bird is Top 25-50, LeBron is already Top 10-20, right?)
· Michael Cooper
· Dennis Rodman
· John Havlicek (except for when he was a SG)
· Kevin Garnett
· Bobby Jones
· Scottie Pippen
· Shawn Marion
· Julius Erving
· Dave DeBusschere
· Larry Nance
· Josh Smith
· Kevin McHale
· Gerald Wallace
· Andrei Kirilenko
· Bruce Bowen
· Dan Roundfield (my pick for Most Underrated Player Ever, perhaps)
· ...and...then who else? Karl Malone? Paul Silas? Tayshaun Prince? Horace Grant? Role players like Satch Sanders? Bird has a case against those guys, going by the only ways we can judge defense halfway-accurately.
That's about a dozen small forwards. About 20 forwards overall. So, no, okay, let's just dispense with figuring out if he's Top 25 overall on D for now, forget that rarified air. Let's just focus on Bird's place among forwards as an defender. It looks like Top 20 Defensive Forward is right there for him to lay claim to, no? That'd necessarily mean he was a great defender, right? Top 20 Defensive Forward?
Whoa, now I'm starting to get very skeptical. You've convinced me that Bird is comfortably an above-average defender, but top 20 defensive forward? Some other forwards from today's league that I take before Bird on defense:
Andre Iguodala
Paul George
Kevin Durant
Kawhi Leonard
Shane Battier (prime)
Anthony Davis (listed as PF on espn.com)
Michael Kidd-Gilchrist
George, probably, eventually. But not yet, if we're doing all-time ranking. Nobody else, though. I mean, why? Let's put a showcase of Bird's defensive best against any other defender's. What exactly do the other players
do that make them not only more
effective on defense (as already mentioned, effectiveness does not require elite athleticism) but even more impressive. How did Bird's lack of elite
overall athleticism actually hinder his defensive value
or even diminish the impressiveness of his defense as it actually was?
And that's just from today's league. There are many, many other guys (Rasheed Wallace, Kenyon Martin) that have retired or I just haven't seen that are at that level. What do these players all have in common? Elite athleticism, elite hustle, and (mostly) elite IQ. Bird had elite hustle and IQ, but not athleticism. That's what firmly keeps him out of any "top 20 defensive forward" or "top 50 defender" conversation. It's also what makes his defense a definite minus in any comparison to prime Lebron James, one of the most versatile, athletic, and intelligent defenders the league has ever seen. Bird made many spectacular, game-saving plays due to his intelligence, but he didn't have the athleticism to really frustrate offenses and opposing scorers on a play-by-play basis.
I respectfully call BS, frustrating offenses and opposing scorers does not require the athleticism you're positing as integral to defensive greatness. Again:
Assume nothing. "Well, naturally, Rick Mahorn or Tayshaun Prince or [insert player] was a better defender than Bird..." Not so fast, is my advice.
I realize that my dismissal of advanced stats is the weak point in my argument, so I'd be interested to hear more about why you think Bird's high rankings there point to actual high-level defensive performance.
Simply put: It's the pudding, and where else are you going to find proof?
More specifically, I think Bird's defensive greatness could maybe be explained best by some Moneyball-ish re-arranging of priorities re: What We Value About Defense. Just like Battier's profile has rightfully been raised by a deeper appreciation for What Really Matters. Just like baseball hitters who walked a lot went underappreciated. There will be some Gladwellian "Ahhh...ha!" answer to Why Bird Is So Overrated By Advanced Defensive Metrics, and it will involve Bird-not-actually-being-overrated-by-those-stats and us-not-quite-fully-appreciating-what-constitutes-great-defense.
Thanks for making this thread into a great discussion. I think one could easily change the title to "Larry Bird vs. Lebron James - greatest forward of all time." Those are the stakes, so it's worthwhile to delve into the nitty-gritty.
Man, thank
you. I don't get treated too often to your level of understanding and appreciation. It means a lot to me.
I agree about the stakes, and I'm wedded permanently to the goal of figuring this comparison out, rating Bird's defense accurately one way or another...and helping to maybe re-define what we prize in a defender, too, lol? I love this thread.
. (The award was voted on by the players at that time.)
