Victor Wembanyama to deliver the NBA’s greatest defensive season ever (Hot Takes We Might Actually Believe)

The 2024-25 NBA season is here. At the end of an uneventful offseason, we take our annual trip too close to the sun, daring you to stand the swelter of these views. This is Hot Takes We Might Actually Believe.

Last season, when Minnesota Timberwolves wings Jaden McDaniels and Anthony Edwards hounded Boston Celtics counterparts Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown down the stretch of a game between the NBA’s two top-seeded teams, I wondered: Is Wolves center Rudy Gobert — then a three-time Defensive Player of the Year and the betting favorite to win the award again — even the best defender on his own team?

That led me to some conversations with front-office folks from around the NBA about the importance of interior vs. perimeter defense. That discussion also became a hot topic among executives in 2022, when both Marcus Smart and Mikal Bridges finished ahead of Gobert in Defensive Player of the Year voting.

If the game is more reliant on 3-point shooting than ever before, and versatility has never been so vital, shouldn’t the ability to switch across positions on the perimeter be the most coveted defensive skill?

Measuring defensive impact

There is no reason why teams should do the legwork to measure one kind of defense against another. Who wins awards has no bearing on their records. Is someone a good on-ball defender? A good help defender? A good rim protector? These are the questions. Ideally, one player does all three well, but in our imperfect world, teams tinker to find five-man units that canvas the court, as they say, “on a string.” A rim-protecting center here, a few switchable wings there, just to mask the guard who cannot guard.

But could teams measure one aspect of defense against another?

“Sure,” one Eastern Conference executive told Yahoo Sports, “but our data is finite.”

You either block a shot or you do not. Your opponent either makes a shot or misses it. Teams have access to a wealth of analytics beyond those publicly available, but even that cannot tell you everything your eyes do. Each possession results in an outcome, and statistics do not necessarily tell you how hard a perimeter defender fought through a screen or how much a rim protector’s presence thwarted a drive.

In that sense, we can never fully quantify a player’s impact defensively. But we can add all that finite data together and determine — to some degree — how many points each defender managed to save … right?

“Obviously,” the Eastern Conference executive said.

So, that is what I set out to do, at least with available data, which made two things clear: Interior defense is more important than perimeter defense, and Victor Wembanyama is already the NBA’s best defender.

First, a little about the process.

Counting statistics

I started with the basics. Steals and charges end possessions. Blocks deny scoring opportunities, some from beyond the arc. The sum of them can tell us exactly how many buckets a defender directly denied.

(STEALS + CHARGES) 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-point percentage (league average)

Quantifying rebounds

Defensive rebounds also end possessions, but grabbing a rebound does not mean you did all the defensive work to erase more points. However, the league’s available tracking data can tell us what percentage of rebounds a team grabs when a player is on or off the court. The difference between the two tells how much better a team rebounds when someone is on the floor — and how many extra possessions that margin prevents.

{[(DREB% ON/OFF / 100) x 102*] x 1.154**} x GAMES PLAYED

*Possessions per game (league average)

**Offensive rating (league average)

A hand in the face

The NBA also tracks how many field goals a player challenges, whether or not those shots are successful and “the difference between the normal percentage of a shooter on shots throughout the season and the percentage on shots when the defensive player is guarding the shooter.” There are qualitative limitations to this data, including shooter’s luck and a defender’s proximity, but it is important to quantify how much worse opponents actually were when defended by a certain player, and available stats allow us to do it.

[(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 some way to quantify a player’s impact on five-man defensive units — how much his presence was felt by opposing teams — and I think the best way to do that is with his Real Adjusted Plus-Minus. It is an individualized plus-minus statistic, adjusted to account for the quality of players on the court for either team. Essentially: How many points did each player save his team absent box-score data?

RAPM* x 1.02**

*Real Adjusted Plus-Minus

**Possessions per game / 100

Points Defended (PD)

Add it together, and you can tally the Points Defended by a player per game. Here is the top 10 among everyone who received at least one vote for an All-Defensive bid this past season …

Hey, look at that: Wembanyama was by far the best defensive player in the league last season, at least according to this metric. In fact, Wembanyama saved his team more points per game as a rookie than every Defensive Player of the Year did as far back as the public data goes. (Which is only 2015. But still!)

Again: Wembanyama was a rookie last season. His ceiling here knows no bounds.

Prepare for Wembanyama to dominate

It is not a question of whether he will lead the NBA in blocks this season. His 3.6 per game last season led the league, and he is an overwhelming favorite to do so again, per BetMGM. Instead we should ask: Can Wembanyama average five blocks a game? Only Mark Eaton has eclipsed that mark, averaging 5.6 blocks per game in the 1984-85 season. Wembanyama produced 4.3 per 36 minutes as a 19-year-old first-timer.

Wembanyama is also a decent bet to average the most steals per game this season. De’Aaron Fox’s two per game led the NBA last season, and there is no reason Wembanyama cannot push his 1.2 steals per game to two this season.

Then a David Robinson record is in play. Robinson averaged 6.8 STOCKS (2.3 steals + 4.5 blocks) per game during the 1991-92 season. It is one of the finest defensive seasons ever, along with Hakeem Olajuwon’s 1989-90 campaign. Bill Russell would have something to say if they counted those statistics in his day.

Point is: Centers rule. As another Eastern Conference executive explained, imagine perimeter defense as the pencil and rim protection as the eraser. If you have perfect penmanship and great spelling, you can manage without an eraser. “But if you have s***ty grammar, you need an eraser. It’s always nice to have.”

You know what is a good eraser? A 7-foot-4 self-described “alien.” Wembanyama is ready. You know it if you saw him will France to a respectable loss against the very best the U.S. had to offer in the Olympics.

When I asked an executive if he would be surprised if Wembanyama were to rank among the best defensive players ever, according to a metric that quantifies how many points someone saves a game, he said, “Not that much.”

So, there you have it, folks: Prepare for the greatest defensive season ever (Wemby’s version).

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