#3 Best Defensive Shooting Guard of all time - The ten best defenders in each position project

[oaktownwarriors87]

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[IgorK]

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[cecilthesheep]

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[iggymcfrack]

I like the notifications a lot. Makes the project so much easier to follow.

[kendogg]

I vote Michael Cooper. Incredible defender and very versatile as well. Was the lockdown defender of one of the best teams of all time. Has the peak (DPOY as a guard is very rare and came late in his career as well) and has the longevity (8x all defense). 5x champion, and that matters because the competition is the toughest in the playoffs.

[penbeast0]

One issue here; I'm not sure whether defensive rebounding should count for much. For bigs, sure, but if a guard is rebounding a ton (Tom Gola, Fat Lever, etc.) it may be based on the coach's view of their offensive role. Rebounding is extremely valuable defensively as it prevents an offensive possession, but it means they aren't getting out on the fast break as often. Interested in some feedback on this.

It does seem that this is coming down to Michael Cooper or Tony Allen, both good choices. By eye test, Allen was the more disruptive and our seamheads pretty consistently say the stats back him to the degree we have them. I think of Cooper as the more athletic and versatile but I will go with Tony Allen, the Nate McMillan of shooting guards.

PS. Sure looks odd to see Don Chaney listed as playing in LA and St. Louis but not in Boston.

[pandrade83]

I'll go with Tony Allen as well here - robust defensive metrics & obviously passes the eye test. Cooper is obviously a superb alternative.

[PigsOnTheWing]

I came here thinking about voting for Alvin Robertson, but I've changed my mind upon further research and thus I'm voting for Tony Allen.

Alvin Robertson still holds the all-time record for steals per game with 2.71, but is it possible that those steals weren't coming within the flow of the defense, but because he gambled and maybe tried to stat-pad them. It is also strange for a team that has such a good perimeter defender to be average in opponents TOV%, the component of the four-factors that is most affected by guards. The most concerning part of the detailed description of his defense cited by Owly in the #1 thread is that he seems to have been an instinctive defender and that his instinct was not very good.

After thinking about this a more, I must vote for Allen, who provides enormous impact to the defense despite having otherwordly good boxscore numbers. Neither him nor Robertson have big minutes (nor have Cooper) so it comes down to who had the highest impact, and imo it's Allen.

[PigsOnTheWing]

One issue here; I'm not sure whether defensive rebounding should count for much. For bigs, sure, but if a guard is rebounding a ton (Tom Gola, Fat Lever, etc.) it may be based on the coach's view of their offensive role. Rebounding is extremely valuable defensively as it prevents an offensive possession, but it means they aren't getting out on the fast break as often. Interested in some feedback on this.

It does seem that this is coming down to Michael Cooper or Tony Allen, both good choices. By eye test, Allen was the more disruptive and our seamheads pretty consistently say the stats back him to the degree we have them. I think of Cooper as the more athletic and versatile but I will go with Tony Allen, the Nate McMillan of shooting guards.

PS. Sure looks odd to see Don Chaney listed as playing in LA and St. Louis but not in Boston.

The difficult part with rebounding is that, among all the fundamentals of the game, it's by far the most affected by team schemes.
An easy example of this is Westbrook, whose teammates sometimes don't take the ball purposefully to let him push the fastbreak (and the same was done by the Showtime Lakers with Magic). This not a bad thing at all, but it doesn't necessarily mean that Westbrook or Magic are great at the boards.
Besides, it is not really important who grabs the rebound, rather if the team does, so apart from big men (who have the responsibility of taking them), I don't give value to defensive rebounds at all. This doesn't mean that I completely ignore rebounding. If I have the certainty of the fact that the team is better at it with a player than without, I have to give him a plus. Unfortunately though, we only have on/off splits from 2001 onwards so I don't know how to understand if a pre-databall player was good at rebounding.

[feyki]

Tony Allen, for sure. Only SG to compete against Jordan in that regard.

[penbeast0]

One issue here; I'm not sure whether defensive rebounding should count for much. For bigs, sure, but if a guard is rebounding a ton (Tom Gola, Fat Lever, etc.) it may be based on the coach's view of their offensive role. Rebounding is extremely valuable defensively as it prevents an offensive possession, but it means they aren't getting out on the fast break as often. Interested in some feedback on this.

It does seem that this is coming down to Michael Cooper or Tony Allen, both good choices. By eye test, Allen was the more disruptive and our seamheads pretty consistently say the stats back him to the degree we have them. I think of Cooper as the more athletic and versatile but I will go with Tony Allen, the Nate McMillan of shooting guards.

PS. Sure looks odd to see Don Chaney listed as playing in LA and St. Louis but not in Boston.

The difficult part with rebounding is that, among all the fundamentals of the game, it's by far the most affected by team schemes.
An easy example of this is Westbrook, whose teammates sometimes don't take the ball purposefully to let him push the fastbreak (and the same was done by the Showtime Lakers with Magic). This not a bad thing at all, but it doesn't necessarily mean that Westbrook or Magic are great at the boards.
Besides, it is not really important who grabs the rebound, rather if the team does, so apart from big men (who have the responsibility of taking them), I don't give value to defensive rebounds at all. This doesn't mean that I completely ignore rebounding. If I have the certainty of the fact that the team is better at it with a player than without, I have to give him a plus. Unfortunately though, we only have on/off splits from 2001 onwards so I don't know how to understand if a pre-databall player was good at rebounding.

Agree, and yet you get a Jason Kidd or Tom Gola who are playing PG roles and defending guards while averaging double figure rebounds and that has to have a positive effect on their teams compared so a player like Chauncey Billups or Joe Dumars who get very few rebounds. I have a good idea of man defense with players I've seen a lot, but struggle with how to weigh this and don't feel it's right to ignore it completely especially for players where it's a big part of their greatness.

[SHAQ32]

Voting for Alvin Robertson

[An Unbiased Fan]

Haven't been following this project, but don't get all this Tony Allen love. Dude is a career 22 mpg bench player. An under-sized SG who has been good defensively in the spurts he's on the court.

I guess his +/- numbers may be the reason, but he's the posterboy of how that stat is rotational. A guy who never even had over 27 mpg in a season, would have had a big +/- dropoff playing bigger minutes with less favorable rotations, and expending energy for a full game.

[Gibson22]

Tony allen 10 (Dr Positivity, cecilthesheep, electricmayhem, mddonnelly1989, lost92bricks, iggymcfrack, penbeast0, pandrade83, bounce_9, feyki)
Michael Cooper 3 (kendogg, samurai, bledredwine)
Alvin Robertson 2 (GYK, BAMBA5)
Joe Dumars 1 (OdomFan)

[Owly]

Haven't been following this project, but don't get all this Tony Allen love. Dude is a career 22 mpg bench player. An under-sized SG who has been good defensively in the spurts he's on the court.

I guess his +/- numbers may be the reason, but he's the posterboy of how that stat is rotational. A guy who never even had over 27 mpg in a season, would have had a big +/- dropoff playing bigger minutes with less favorable rotations, and expending energy for a full game.

I’m not sure what “that stat is rotational” means but I assume from context it’s suggesting that the suggestion is that Allen’s number is boosted by context. And one of those contexts highlighted is low minutes.

So let’s, for the sake of argument, imagine that’s true. Now we know that Allen can, over a large sample, play at a standard leading to positing a 2.65 DRAPM when playing 21mpg (his 1997-2014 DRAPM). We know he can play as hard as he did over the minutes he did play. Let’s suppose that he’s playing to about his absolute limit and fatigue would render him, for a final extra say 10.5 minutes (for 31.5mpg total), he's at the standard of a -1 DRAPM player. Now that’s a huge dropoff (-3.65) but let’s suppose it. By my math (2/3 times the higher rate + 1/3 times the lower rate) he’s a 1.433333 DRAPM player. Rate-wise he falls behind Iggy in the 97-14 sample (counted as an SF here), he falls behind Greg Minor (tiny sample, most of career played outside of sample), he falls behind Jaren Jackson, Thabo and Avery Bradley [though Bradley’s on-off splits have been significantly worse after 2014, DRAPM variants likely so too - cf Allen’s bad DRPMs for ‘16 and ‘17) and Ronnie Brewer and … I think that’s it. Except now new hypothetical Allen has a huge minutes advantage over all those guys in the SG field.

Oh, and the 97-14 sample excludes his best on-off split in what is also one of his higher minutes seasons (2015).

I’m nowhere near as “in” on RAPM and plus/minus variants as where I think the “smart basketball fan” is on average, but unless you think that it’s literally nothing, or that coaches have been managing their rotations with a priority to inflating Allen’s RAPM, it’s hard to see how Allen isn’t an obvious leading contender and one the guys (perhaps/probably the guy) we can have the highest degree of confidence in having a huge degree of impact on defense at this position and to have been doing what he’s been doing you have to be really good at defense.

That said if you have a compelling case say Nick Anderson or Latrell Sprewell or Wade or Sloan or whomever, whether for them in voting manner or providing evidence that there is a field of options providing superior career value to Allen, you should make the case for them, involve yourself and enrich the debate perhaps thereby change peoples minds. I fear though, that posting just against him, where the thrust (and best part) of the point is an acknowledged known factor (low minutes) and the rest is fairly speculative won't have much impact.

[An Unbiased Fan]

^
DRAPM isn't a measure of defensive play, but instead more about the role of a player within the team's rotations. Tony Allen is a utility player who is usually part of defensive lineups, the same way a 3pt gunner off the bench would be part of offensive lineups. In terms of impact, a player coming in at 27 mpg at his peak isn't haven't the same effect as most of the defensive greats who played far more minutes.

Sure, I could take MJ and say hey...play 20-something minutes off the bench where you focus all your energy pretty much solely on defensive for that spurt..and he would outperform Tony Allen easily. It's like comparing a reliever to a starting pitcher in terms of impact. You can be aces for 1-2 innings, but it doesn't compare to a guy going 7-9 innings holding down the opponent. Minutes matter, Boban Marjanovic is all-world based on per 36 minutes output, but dude is on court for like 9 mpg.

Don't get me wrong, Allen was/is an amazing defender. But his mpg is a big knock when you compare him to other top defenders.

[penbeast0]

^
DRAPM isn't a measure of defensive play, but instead more about the role of a player within the team's rotations. Tony Allen is a utility player who is usually part of defensive lineups, the same way a 3pt gunner off the bench would be part of offensive lineups. In terms of impact, a player coming in at 27 mpg at his peak isn't haven't the same effect as most of the defensive greats who played far more minutes.

Sure, I could take MJ and say hey...play 20-something minutes off the bench where you focus all your energy pretty much solely on defensive for that spurt..and he would outperform Tony Allen easily. It's like comparing a reliever to a starting pitcher in terms of impact. You can be aces for 1-2 innings, but it doesn't compare to a guy going 7-9 innings holding down the opponent. Minutes matter, Boban Marjanovic is all-world based on per 36 minutes output, but dude is on court for like 9 mpg.

Don't get me wrong, Allen was/is an amazing defender. But his mpg is a big knock when you compare him to other top defenders.

Instead of comparing Allen to MJ (or Moncrief) who has already been chosen, who else on the list do you think had more defensive impact than Allen? Cooper is the popular second choice but he is also a defensive specialist who came off the bench for most of his biggest impact years. So, who do you think is a better choice? Sloan? Richmond? Kobe?

[Owly]

^
DRAPM isn't a measure of defensive play, but instead more about the role of a player within the team's rotations. Tony Allen is a utility player who is usually part of defensive lineups, the same way a 3pt gunner off the bench would be part of offensive lineups. In terms of impact, a player coming in at 27 mpg at his peak isn't haven't the same effect as most of the defensive greats who played far more minutes.

Sure, I could take MJ and say hey...play 20-something minutes off the bench where you focus all your energy pretty much solely on defensive for that spurt..and he would outperform Tony Allen easily. It's like comparing a reliever to a starting pitcher in terms of impact. You can be aces for 1-2 innings, but it doesn't compare to a guy going 7-9 innings holding down the opponent. Minutes matter, Boban Marjanovic is all-world based on per 36 minutes output, but dude is on court for like 9 mpg.

Don't get me wrong, Allen was/is an amazing defender. But his mpg is a big knock when you compare him to other top defenders.

"DRAPM isn't a measure of defensive play", sure and nothing else is. Everything is a proxy. If we had a single, absolutely accurate standard unit of measure this wouldn't be a debate. It's just probably the best proxy we have, particularly where we have a large, multi-year sample that includes different team contexts.

"who is usually part of defensive lineups". Hmmm. So his ORAPM is underrating his offense? Which teams afford to play one-way lineups for any length of time (e.g. "usually" - which the top google result [for usually as a percentage] suggests is circa 80%, fwiw - out of 21mpg)?

"Sure, I could take MJ and say hey...play 20-something minutes off the bench where you focus all your energy pretty much solely on defensive for that spurt". Well firstly, MJ's in. In first. So feel free to find the people annoyed at that and shout at them. Slightly odd if you're taking pot shots [exclusively] at non-specific people for their earlier voting tendencies after the fact though, so I'm assuming this was at his present voters too. But to engage, yes he could. And it's possible (depending upon your opinion of Jordan's offensive ceiling, and how close you think he played to that on a night-to-night basis, and exactly how many minutes he did play) that such a player would have been a more impactful defender, despite less minutes. The extent to which people choose to measure impact versus a vaguer notion of ability has been left pretty open here and has been a matter of discussion.

"and he would outperform Tony Allen easily." Is both moot at this point with MJ in and, fwiw, pure conjecture.

"Minutes matter", has literally anyone argued that they don't?

"Boban Marjanovic is all-world based on per 36 minutes output, but dude is on court for like 9 mpg." Boban has played a much, much smaller sample. Boban, it would seem fair to surmise, is a player whose stamina is weaker presently has played around 9mpg a game, and played in something close to every other game (42.66666667 games a year) and would be less able to sustain tripling or quadrupling his mpg and sextupling or octupling his total season minutes than Allen would have playing 1.5x his career minute level. Boban can't matchup with his guy defensively and so his productivity is much higher than his impact stats, which include his defensive weakness. Boban, for these reasons, is a dreadful analogue for Allen.

"You can be aces for 1-2 innings, but it doesn't compare to a guy going 7-9 innings holding down the opponent." 1) That really depends on to what extent the guy is "aces" and the other is "holding down the opponent". 2) Your ratio offered here, which at it's most generous offers 2:7, and at worst 1:9 is wildly, wildly off for an analogy to minutes gap between Allen and the rest of the field here.

[O_6]

Haven't been following this project, but don't get all this Tony Allen love. Dude is a career 22 mpg bench player. An under-sized SG who has been good defensively in the spurts he's on the court.

I guess his +/- numbers may be the reason, but he's the posterboy of how that stat is rotational. A guy who never even had over 27 mpg in a season, would have had a big +/- dropoff playing bigger minutes with less favorable rotations, and expending energy for a full game.

The autograph reads: "To Tony, the best defender I ever faced!" - Kobe Bryant

Kobe
Chris Paul
Kevin Durant
Curry

Tony Allen is the best I've seen at guarding each one of these players, in an era where offensive perimeter players have a huge advantage from years past. All these guys have vastly different skillsets yet Tony was giving all of them a ton of trouble. He was a great on-ball defender who gave Durant a ton of problems due to Durant's dribble not being elite, and he's the GOAT defensive wing at getting around screens and chasing guys off-screens imo. He was giving Curry/Klay so much trouble because he'd be shadowing them off-screens in a way they weren't used to. Problem was the Warriors exposed his offense.

The fact that Marc Gasol got more credit for the Grizzlies D than Tony Allen while Bowen/Kawhi received more credit for the Spurs D than Duncan is one of the all-time mysteries to me. The Grizzlies' success on D was due mainly to dominating the perimeter on D, with an attack spearheaded by Allen. The Spurs' success on D was due mainly to Duncan's rim protection and the Spurs' "mid-range shots are ok to give up" strategy.

Tony Allen was better than Bowen, Artest, Battier, or anyone else I've seen in the last 15 years. I don't know if Coop/Moncrief were better, but I doubt it. MJ played so many more minutes and had insane athleticism so I could see the #1 argument for him, but I believe that Tony Allen is the best per-minute defensive wing player in NBA history. His '15 and '13 seasons were the 2 best defensive wing seasons I've seen.

I don't expect to participate on a lot of these, but if you want to count my vote I'd go Tony Allen.

[An Unbiased Fan]

^
DRAPM isn't a measure of defensive play, but instead more about the role of a player within the team's rotations. Tony Allen is a utility player who is usually part of defensive lineups, the same way a 3pt gunner off the bench would be part of offensive lineups. In terms of impact, a player coming in at 27 mpg at his peak isn't haven't the same effect as most of the defensive greats who played far more minutes.

Sure, I could take MJ and say hey...play 20-something minutes off the bench where you focus all your energy pretty much solely on defensive for that spurt..and he would outperform Tony Allen easily. It's like comparing a reliever to a starting pitcher in terms of impact. You can be aces for 1-2 innings, but it doesn't compare to a guy going 7-9 innings holding down the opponent. Minutes matter, Boban Marjanovic is all-world based on per 36 minutes output, but dude is on court for like 9 mpg.

Don't get me wrong, Allen was/is an amazing defender. But his mpg is a big knock when you compare him to other top defenders.

Instead of comparing Allen to MJ (or Moncrief) who has already been chosen, who else on the list do you think had more defensive impact than Allen? Cooper is the popular second choice but he is also a defensive specialist who came off the bench for most of his biggest impact years. So, who do you think is a better choice? Sloan? Richmond? Kobe?

I have Copper slightly above Tony Allen(I felt he guards the PG/SG/SF) positions better with his length, but he gets knocked too due to his mpg. I'm the same way with bigs. Great defnesive anchors like Russ, TD, Hakeem, had more impact than specialist bigs.

As for better choices, I just haven't been following the project, so don't know the arguments being made, or criteria most are using for their picks. Defensive needs vary by position, and with a SG I want a guy who can defend the 1-3 positions, a guy who can prevent penetrations and bother shots with man defense, a guy who can play defensive lanes, and a player who can get back on transition. Richmond has no business being near the Top 10 or Top 20 defensive SGs, IMO. Sloan was great for his era, but defending SGs in the 60's was a far cry to the post=3pt era in terms of rules and athleticism. Robertson, Bryant, E.Jones, Dumars all logged impactful mpg and were on par defensively with Coop & Allen.

Don't want to disrupt things though, just felt Tony Allen was being elevated a bit high. I also wonder how much versatility has come up. Mainly because at every position, being able to switch is critical on defense. Tony Allen has a great defensive motor, but he's not a guy you want switching to a SF, which is what MJ, Kobe, Eddie, Coop could do. Allen's defense on a guy like Lebron never impressed me. And at 6'4 180, that shouldn't be a surprise. Same goes for quickness against PGs, though Allen is elite against them. Guys like Alvin Robertson are even smaller, I do feel 80's players get a boost from the DPOY awards given out back then, different era I suppose.