Comments on: Which Players Have Played For the Best Defenses?

By: Bill

Bill — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 17:17:04 +0000

@3 -- Not really. Rodman kept leaving teams just as they started to decline, and thus, kept missing the defensive regression inherent to a team getting old.

By: Loe

Loe — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 15:13:15 +0000

@AYC- I think what get's lost in the sauce is the different trends and philosophies that coaches have a different times during the history of the game. Just as the three pointer was looked at as mostly a bailout shot during the eighties instead of a major weapon like the 90's theirs been different defensive philosophies. Like in the eighties it was mostly man to man or the 1-2-2 zone but the late eighties(bad, boys) and nineties was a focus on help defense. After watching alot of tape of wilt , russell, Oscar, west, it's obviuos that double teaming wasn't something they like to do philosophically during that era.

By: Loe

Loe — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 19:01:12 +0000

@34 ' I know the double team isn't a modern invention but when watching footage from wilt's era i barely see any double teams. Alot of people don't know but they had defensive three seconds all over the court after you cross time line, this with the faster pace made double teaming tactically harder. No zones back then and you couldn't double team on the in bound pass.

By: AYC

AYC — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 15:49:19 +0000

The double-team isn't some modern invention. Most of the footage of Wilt that's easily available shows him playing the Celtics. They often played him one-on-one because a) they had Russell, and b) they had a defensive philosophy of letting big scorers go off while containing their teammates. I wouldn't assume that all teams played him that way; most other teams didn't have the personnel to play that way.

By: Loe

Loe — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 14:26:41 +0000

@31 and 32- Yeah i figured it was highly unfeasible. Maybe i can get my hands on footage of the top big men and history or just a sample portion and count them or maybe get a team of guys assign them to one guy and come up with those stats. Just something i'm really curious about, My theory is Shaq saw the most double teams per touch, hakeem , then kareem then wilt. That's my theory. The world will probably never know.

By: Neil Paine

Neil Paine — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 20:46:55 +0000

Right. If Synergy Sports existed 15 years ago, we could research things that weren't tracked in the basic box score or the on/off +/- stats, and we could put together "double team leaderboards", etc. But the thing is, Synergy in its current incarnation didn't even exist 6 years ago, much less during the primes of Ewing, Shaq, Hakeem, Robinson, or even the 1st half of Duncan's career. We can only work with the data that's out there, and unfortunately, basketball is only now obsessively tracking the kinds of things we have going back to the 1980s at Baseball-Reference.

By: Greyberger

Greyberger — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 20:12:50 +0000

@29, I don't doubt that somebody somewhere has been collecting double team stats over the past few years. When you can feasibly record every minute of every game with league pass and home electronics, there's all sorts of inside-the-possession information that the dedicated fan could record. Somebody out there might have career dribbles numbers for Monta Ellis and a theory for what they mean. The problem with these stats, once you find someone who claims to have them, is that they're probably not reliable, probably not free, and probably don't go back far enough to look at the entirety of Tim Duncan's career, let alone Shaq's. If someone told me Shaq drew a double team on x percentage of his plays in '94-'95, I would say take show me your tape collection.

By: Nick

Nick — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 20:40:03 +0000

"I guess that leads to an interesting question (which may have been answered elsewhere) but, which incarnation of the Lakers has been better: the Shaq-led era or the Kobe-led era?"

Better compared to the league or better compared to each other? Compared to the league, the Kobe-led era is better. But there were probably 4 teams during the Shaq-era run that were better than any team was last year or the year before(varying by year, the Spurs, Kings, Mavs and Lakers).

By: loe

loe — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 19:00:04 +0000

Neil got a topic for you to research. Don't know if it's really feasible. When discussing the great centers and big men to ever play the game one thing gets left out when people discuss who's better. The amount of double teams each player has seen. I use to think Wilt was double teamed all the time but when actually watching alot of video of him i seen some double teams but nothing remotely comparable to what Shaq saw his first 13 years of his career. My theory is that Shaq has seen more double teams per game , or per possession than any player(Jordan posssible exception) that has ever played the game. But let's just limit this to centers and power forwards. Remember when a couple years back People was asking Shaq who was the best bigman and he said he was cuz he's the only one that gets double teamed, and i thought that was funny but true and sensible. Is there any way you can find this out for me?

By: Jason J

Jason J — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 17:36:48 +0000

"shockingly non-dominant" is my new favorite expression to describe any underachiever of any kind.