What follows is part of a piece I wrote before on another site. It’s related to some posts on this one, and it’s meant in large part to Bold Face one of my basic beliefs when it comes to finding stars in the draft. That is, we entirely underrate the importance of defense. More than that, we also tend to evaluate athletic potential as defensive ability, when the best defenders at the NBA level tend in almost cases to have shown incredible defensive ability (not just potential) on the college level.
I’ve used ESPN’s RPM in the tables below, but you could use BPM as well, or probably Win Shares, or if you have access to some proprietary metrics using Synergy Stats, I’m sure the analysis that follows would hold there too. You might just be slightly juggling lists or shifting names about, depending on how your metric of choice grades these players.
What we’ll see is this: That while there is a path to being a plus NBA player without defensive ability, as the Celtics’ Isaiah Thomas shows us, there is little possibility of being what I would call a star. Or rather, a foundational player for a team with an honest shot at winning a championship. A year in, year out Top 12 player in the league. In this regard, James Harden is truly an exception. Maybe Damian Lillard will someday join him. And it’s not by coincidence that both of these players are Primary Perimeter Initiators.
We can see a demonstration of these statements in the tables below:
Several things are pretty apparent if we look at the top 30 NBA players (by ESPN’s RPM) the last three years.
1) The best teams have multiple players in the Top 15 players and/or the number 1 player in the league, and/or both.
2) Being the 8th or 9th to 30th best player in the league really doesn’t make that much of an impact on your team’s ultimate chances of success, unless there is another player on your team that is better than you or very nearly as good as you. That is to say, for a team to be a legitimate championship contender, having a top 6 or 7 player, and I might even say Top 3 is almost a must, except under the rarest of conditions.
3) To be a top 30 player, you almost need to contribute on defense. Very few players are good enough on offense to break the top 30 without adding value defensively. Almost no players are good enough to break the Top 30 if they take something off the table on defense. (Once again, James Harden is an exception, as well as Damian Lillard. And to say that, we might even be ignoring that this is an average score which underrates just how badly a negative defender puts their team behind the eight ball against an elite offensive team, like those that belong to the team’s one might need to beat in order to win an NBA championship.)
4) This fact, the importance that a player contributes on defense, becomes even more apparent if we look at the Top 8 players. Only Curry, Harden and Westbrook have been good enough over the last 3 years to add a Top 8 per game value while being somewhat negative defenders. And if you notice with Curry over the last two years, he’s actually improved his defense a lot, not just because of on-ball improvements but because he’s both increased his defensive rebounding from 10.9% to 11.4% to 13.4% this year and because he’s increased his steal percentage from 2.2% to 3.0%, which has remained steady the last two years.
5) We also notice that most of the best overall players in the league are either centers who provide value on defense (In 2015-2016, Jordan, Cousins, Jokic, Gasol, Duncan, Plumlee-though I’m a little skeptical here, Mahinmi, Davis, Drummond), players who serve at least in part as their team’s primary on-ball initiator (Curry, Westbrook, James, Paul, Lowry, Durant, George, Harden, Butler, Rubio, Wall, Hayward, Ginobili, Anthony, even to some extent Leonard and Green), and then to a lesser extent, stretch fours (Green, Millsap, Love, Bosh, Williams) and jack-of-all-trades super defender types (Leonard and Green, who both fit multiple categories and Jae Crowder.)
This is why finding primary on-ball initiators is so much more important in the draft than finding shooters, especially shooters who can’t play defense. 16 of the Top 30 by this metric could be said to have primary on-ball capabilities which allow them initiate their team’s offense. And basically all of them were the primary initiator of the offense on their college team. And really, you could add Jae Crowder to the list, making it 17-30 and every player who plays on the perimeter, since he was at the point of Marquette’s offensive attack the two years he was there.
6) A suspicious lack of One-And-Done perimeter players. Seriously, Lebron (who went from high school), Durant, Conley, Bledsoe, Anthony and Wall, the last three years and that’s it for One-And-Done Perimeter players. For perimeter players who made the top 10 in the last three years, it’s basically dominated by sophomores (Westbrook, Harden, Paul, George, Iguodola and Leonard.) Though the best player of last three years is a junior in Steph Curry and another in Khris Middleton. And also have a senior in Draymond Green, with another two in Jimmy Butler and Paul Millsap not that far behind. Which is to say, these One-Size-Fits-All Formulas for the draft are perhaps confusing everyone, since younger players on average do become better. Firstly, when a One-And-Done is terrific, it’s either an obvious generational talent on the perimeter like Lebron or Durant or it’s a Power Forward or Center we’re talking about. (Davis, Cousins, Jordan, Bosh, etc . . .) In terms of star players on the perimeter, they often aren’t always the guys that the RSCI initially identifies as the best, and so it takes time for them to get noticed, since they don’t carry the expectation for greatness into college. (Even Chris Paul was number 8 in RSCI.)
7) So what do I take from this? If you want to win a championship, the goal of the draft is not just to find top 30 players, who may take your team to around .500 but no farther without significant help, but to find a top 8-10 player, who might be a Hall Of Fame Caliber player. Obviously, this is difficult to do. Only 12 out of this year’s Top 30 were earmarked as Top 5 selections in their respective drafts. What should be sufficiently easier to do is to identify players who almost certainly won’t be Top 10 players.
That is,
A) Players who project most likely to defend at a negative level, except in the rarest of circumstances. (I’m not positive Denzel Valentine will be a negative defender, since he’s smart, rebounds well, tries very hard and takes nothing for granted on the basketball court, but if there were a player who would be the exception to the rule this year, it would probably be him. As an aside, it’s also very possible that Valentine will have to be on a team with another outstanding wing to be a player of any impact in the playoffs. The reason being that without such a player playing besides them, a guy like Lebron James, Kawhi Leonard, Kevin Durant or Paul George, he’d be very likely to have such players defending him possession-in and possession-out. And very few guys without athleticism find ways to deal with that kind of task, though passing ability can be a great equalizer.)
B) Players who project potentially to score the ball well, but add no ancillary offensive value and do not project as significant plus defenders. That is, basically every wing besides Ben Simmons, Brandon Ingram, and maybe a handful or two handfuls, at most, of others guys.
C) Kevin Love types. Centers and true Power Forwards who likely won’t make up for the mistakes of others on defense, no matter how good they are on offense. Henry Ellenson, Domantas Sabonis, Thomas Stone, Diamond Stone, for instance. Let’s get rid of them. They might be two of the better players out of this draft, but it’s unlikely they’ll be Top 8 to 10 impact players in the league, without a major change in where each player chooses to expend his effort on the court. Maybe, to some extent, Jakob Poeltl as well.
As an aside, Ellenson should become an excellent offensive player if he does consolidate his shooting from distance. Sabonis too, though he doesn’t offer Ellenson’s dribbling ability, which is a skill that really sets him apart from a lot of other power players and should not be underestimated. Power Players with traditional guard skills are built to destroy defenses. Normally, we think about this in regards to shooting from the perimeter. But it is also true of Power Players who can dribble and/or pass. Think about Draymond Green, Paul Millsap and Kevin Love, or many of the greats of the position: Barkley, Garnett, Webber, etc . . .
Dribbling and passing ability are two qualities that set all these guys apart from the pack and Ellenson can definitely dribble and has some chance that he might pass the ball well. My thing with Ellenson is that I believe PFs who can’t defend to be ultimately detrimental to their team’s ability to win a championship. But if you believe there’s a good chance that he can defend, you’d have to rate him much higher than I do.
Another possibility is if you believe there’s a way you could stash him on defense. What I’m talking about here is if a really daring team with a large Point (Giannis, Simmons, Lebron) decided to go zone. Then you could play Ellenson on a wing, where his footspeed might be playable and his size would be ideal for pinching down to the post in defensive recovery situations. Plus he’d have good ability to rebound in space to finish possessions.
D) I might also exclude the little lost puppies, the players who don’t seem to wholly understand basic offensive and/or defensive basketball concepts, S. Labissiere, C. Diallo and Maurice Chriss for instance, since even if they do become good players, it’s likely to be on their 2nd or 3rd NBA team. (Tyson Chandler, who became an all-time great defender, Ed Davis, Ian Mahinmi, Marvin Williams and Al-Farouq Aminu as some recent examples of players who came into the league kind of lost and changed teams before finding real success.)
Though I’d be remiss not to point out that we’ve had two players who played like little lost puppies as Freshman become pretty phenomenal overnight as Rookies in the NBA in DeAndre Jordan and Andre Drummond. I would say the difference is that both of these players are a pretty elite combination of frame and athleticism that can play almost immediately at the center position.
If there’s a player in this class you might type into this category, it might be OG Anunoby or Mikal Bridges, at least in respect to their offensive games. As their defensive games are already very advanced for their age and experience levels.
Conclusion
As I’ve said before and I’ll say again. If we’re interested in finding stars in the draft we should be looking for four types of players: 1. Primary Perimeter Initiators. 2. Two-Way Perimeter Players. 3. Two-Way Big Men. 4. Defensive Centers.
Related to this discovery, we really shouldn’t be underestimating the value of defense, as most of the NBA players who’ve vastly outplayed their draft position in recent years (Kawhi Leonard, Draymond Green, Jimmy Butler, DeAndre Jordan) have this in common, they can really defend.
These are points that can hardly be stated enough.
