The 2024-25 NBA season is around the corner. At the end of an uneventful summer, we take our annual trip very close to the sun and dare you to endure the overwhelming of these views. This Is A Hot Topic That We Can Really Believe In.

Last season, as Minnesota Timberwolves wings Jaden McDaniels and Anthony Edwards followed their Boston Celtics counterparts Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown into a game between two of the NBA’s top-seeded teams, I wondered: Wolves center Rudy Gobert – then three times? Defensive Player of the Year and betting favorite Would you like to win the award again, even if he is the best defender on his own team?

This led me to some conversations with front office staff from around the NBA about the importance of perimeter defense versus interior defense. This debate has also become a hot topic among executives in 2022, with both Marcus Smart and Mikal Bridges finishing ahead of Gobert in Defensive Player of the Year voting.

If the game is more about shooting threes than ever before and versatility has never been more vital, shouldn’t the ability to switch between positions on the perimeter be the most coveted defensive skill?

Measuring defensive impact

There’s no reason for teams to make the necessary preparations to measure one type of defense against another. Who wins a prize has no impact on their records. Is someone a good on-ball defender? Is he a good charity advocate? Is it a good rim protector? These are questions. Ideally, a player does all three well, but in our imperfect world teams struggle to find five-man units to cover the field, as they say, “on the ropes.” There’s a rim-protecting center here, a few interchangeable wings there, to mask the guard who can’t defend.

However it could be Do teams measure one aspect of defense against another?

“Sure,” one Eastern Conference executive told Yahoo Sports, “but the data we have is limited.”

You either block a shot or you don’t. Your opponent either shoots or misses. Teams have access to rich analytics beyond what’s publicly available, but even that can’t tell you everything your eyes are doing. Every possession results in a result, and stats don’t tell you how hard a perimeter defender is tackling behind the scenes or how much a rim protector’s presence hinders a move.

In this sense, we can never fully measure a player’s defensive impact. But we can put all this limited data together and determine, to some extent, how many points each defender managed to save… right?

“Obviously,” the Eastern Conference executive said.

So I decided to do that, at least with the available data, and it made two things clear: Interior defense is more important than perimeter defense, and Victor Wembanyama is already the best defender in the NBA.

First, let’s give some information about the process.

Counting statistics

I started with the basics. Theft and accusations end assets. Blocks prevent scoring opportunities, some of which come from behind the arc. The sum of these can tell us exactly how many baskets a defender directly denied.

(STEALS + LOADS) x 1.161* + (2-POINT BLOCKS x 0.545**) x 2 + (3-POINT BLOCKS x 0.366) x 3

*Points per possession (league average)

**2 point percentage (league average)

***3 points percentage (league average)

Measuring kickbacks

Defensive rebounds also end possession, but getting the rebound doesn’t mean you’re doing all the defensive work to score more points. But the league’s current tracking data can tell us what percentage of a team’s rebounds a player has when he’s on or off the court. The difference between the two shows how much better a team rebounds with someone down and how many extra possessions that difference prevents.

{((DREB% ON/OFF / 100) x 102*) x 1,154**} x GAMES PLAYED

*Number of positions per match (league average)

**Offensive rating (league average)

A hand on your face

The NBA also tracks how many field goals a player challenges, whether those shots are successful, and “the difference between the player’s normal percentage of field goals during the season and the percentage of shots where a defender guards the shooter.” There are qualitative limitations to this data, such as the shooter’s luck and the defender’s proximity; but it is important to measure how badly opponents actually fare when defended by a particular player, and available statistics allow us to do this.

((D2PM x 2P%) x 2 – (D2PM x D2P%) x 2) + ((D3PM x 3P%) x 3 – (D3PM x D3P%) x 3)

defensive presence

I wanted to find a way to measure a player’s impact on five-man defensive units (how much his presence is felt by opposing teams), and I think the best way to do that is to play to his strengths. Real Adjusted Plus-Minus. This is a personalized plus-minus statistic for both teams, adjusted to take into account the quality of players on the field. Basically: In the absence of box score data, how many points did each player contribute to his team?

RAPM* x 1.02**

*Actual Adjusted Plus-Minus

**Positions per match / 100

Points Defended (PD)

Add these together and you can calculate a player’s Points Defended per game. Here are the top 10 of everyone who received at least one vote for the All-Defense bid last season.

Hey, check this out: Wembanyama was by far the best defender in the league last season, at least by this metric. In fact, Wembanyama allowed his team more points per game as a rookie than any Defensive Player of the Year, according to publicly available data. (This is only 2015. But still!)

I repeat: Wembanyama was a rookie last season. The ceiling here knows no bounds.

Prepare for the domination of Wembanyama

It’s not a matter of whether he can lead the NBA in blocks this season. He led the league with 3.6 goals per game last season and is a big favorite to achieve this again. per BetMGM. Instead, we should ask the question: Can Wembanyama average five blocks per game? Only Mark Eaton eclipsed that mark, averaging 5.6 blocks per game in the 1984-85 season. Wembanyama scored 4.3 points in 36 minutes for the first time at the age of 19.

Wembanyama is also a good bet to average the most steals per game this season. De’Aaron Fox led the NBA with two steals per game last season, and there’s no reason why Wembanyama can’t double his 1.2 steals per game this season.

Then a David Robinson record comes into play. Robinson’s average was 6.8 STOCKS (2.3 steals + 4.5 blocks) per game in the 1991-92 season. One of the best defensive seasons ever, along with Hakeem Olajuwon’s 1989-90 season. Bill Russell would have something to say if they had counted these statistics in his day.

The point is: the rule of centers. As another Eastern Conference executive explained, imagine perimeter defense as a pencil and rim protection as an eraser. If you have excellent writing skills and excellent spelling skills, you can get by without needing an eraser. “But if your grammar is bad, you need an eraser. Always nice to have.”

Do you know what a good eraser is? He is a self-described 7-foot-4″foreign.” Wembanyama is ready. You know it if you see that France is going to suffer a respectable upset against the best team the United States has to offer at the Olympics.

When I asked one manager if he would be surprised that Wembanyama was among the best defenders ever by a metric that measures how many points someone saves a game, he said: “Not that much.”

There you have it folks: Get ready for your best defensive season ever (Wemby edition).

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