Anthony Davis is Objectively the Worst Defender of All-Defensive First Teamers
Individual defense is hard to measure. Team defense is easy to measure, but over time the NBA has changed dramatically — giving up 90 points a game in 1949 would have been league worst defense, in 2019 it would be league best. Let’s correct for pace within a year by using http://www.basketball-reference.com's defensive rating (points allowed per possession), let’s correct for changes between years by measuring that rating against the league average, and let’s average this DRtg+ for players across their careers for all years they played at least forty games and weren’t traded. If we do that for the eighty-three players to receive at least one All-Defensive First Team award, our top seven retired players are…
We’ve got the greatest defender ever who is head and shoulders above the field, a couple DPOYs in Robinson and Rodman, and the all time leader in total All-Defensive teams in Duncan.
We also see one of the flaws of this method - if two players play a significant percentage of their careers together, how do we know who’s primarily responsible for the great defense? Sometimes this is easy to figure out, for example Russell without Havlicek still put up the astonishing 108 while Havlicek without Russell put up a merely historically elite 103. Sometimes it’s a little more involved but we can still get there: Duncan without Bowen 105, Duncan without Robinson 105, Duncan without Kawhi Leonard (you guessed it) 105; Bowen without Duncan 102, Robinson without Duncan 103, Leonard without Duncan TBD although through twenty five games the Raptors are rocking a 102.
The takeaway here isn’t that Bowen (for example) was actually a bad defender. The takeaway is that probably Tim Duncan was the second best defender ever and probably Bruce Bowen was a merely very good one, who like everyone else looked better riding the Fundamental’s coattails.
photo credit: AP
Now let’s take a gander at the bottom five:
The first thing to note is the best defenders are much more better than average than the worst defenders are worse than it: 53 players averaged at least a point better than average for their careers, only 2 averaged at least that much worse. This tells us the All-Defensive voters across the various eras did have some idea what they were doing, even if a slight dud slipped in here and there. Before we get to the main course let’s peruse the rest of the list, shall we?
E.C. Coleman and Slick Watts both played from 1974 to 1979 and both happened to be teammates of Moses Malone on the 1979 Rockets (second worst defensive squad in the league). If you had heard of either before now my hat’s off to you.
Moses’ career number is slightly below average, and as mentioned was on some real clunkers, but his only All-Defensive year came when he joined the 1983 76ers who were very good on defense. It was perhaps a little excessive to put three Sixers on the first team (a feat that has since been repeated only by the 96 Bulls) but still, they were very good, so it made sense for Moses and his 15 rebounds 1 steal and 2 blocks per game to get there.
Alvin Robertson is a surprise to end up here - best career steals per game, best single season steals per game, only player with multiple three+ steals per game seasons (and has four) (!), Defensive Player of the Year, only NBA player to record a quadruple double with steals, first line in Wikipedia body is “Best known for his defense”. So what’s going on? Well, his Spurs were awful at defense. Not bad, awful. He got an All-Defensive Second Team for an 88 Spurs team that gave up the most points per game in the league. The only better than average defensive squad he was ever on was the 91 Bucks, and of the six most-minuted players on that team he was a firm sixth in career DRtg+, looking up at Danny Schayes (99), Fred Roberts, Frank Brickowski, and Jay Humphries (all 100), and the great Jack Sikma (102). Maybe steals aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.
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Alright, enough appetizers.
Anthony Davis has been widely regarded as an elite defender since his college days, winning both the Henry Iba Corinthian AND Lefty Driesell Awards with an SEC Defensive Player of the Year to boot. He hasn’t won a big boy DPOY yet but his two top four finishes in the past four years put him in the exclusive company of Kawhi Leonard, Draymond Green, DeAndre Jordan, and Rudy Gobert.
And he’s got the 83rd best DRtg+ of 83 All-Defensive First Team winners.
And like Alvin it’s not a fluke thing, he’s had exactly one season where his team was better than average on defense.
Let’s take a gander at his teammates. We’ll find all the players who played at least two years with him and at least two years without him, and calculate their average DRtg+s. If he’s a great defender saddled with a schlub supporting cast, we should expect their numbers to go up with him, like Bowen went from 102 to 105 when he played with Duncan.
Not only do most of these players play on better defensive teams when they don’t partner Anthony Davis, they’re usually much better. It’s certainly fair to point out that “better” in this case translates to “slightly worse than league average overall”, but the claim isn’t that Davis has played with stoppers his whole career. The claim is that the players he has played with, even though they were not great to start with, got even worse when they played next to him.
With all that said, if you squint you can kind of see an upward trend - maybe young AD was overmatched but modern AD really is a defensive stalwart. Let’s bin the effect he had on players by the first year they played a full season with him and see what happens:
Alright! (The graph can only go to 2017 because any player who started playing with Davis in 2018 can’t have played two seasons with him yet.) This regression projects Davis as a defender who doesn’t make his teammates better or worse in year five, which isn’t quite what we would hope for considering he already had two All-Defensive second teams by that point, but at least we could hope his effect on his teammates and thus his own DRtg+ would continue to rise…
…except…
…after one good and one okay year the Pelicans are right back in the cellar with a very poor 97 DRtg+, and when we adjust everyone’s values for their current year team we get:
Granted there’s still an upward trend that puts Davis at net zero in year six, but we should probably be looking for more from our All-Defensive First Teamers than ‘didn’t actively make my teammates worse’.
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Anthony Davis has the worst career DRtg+ of every All-Defensive First Team player. There is no disputing this. In the eight man set of the teammates to play the most with and without him, seven defended measurably better playing elsewhere, and the eighth was a mere point per five hundred possessions worse, so there is no reason to blame them for his team’s defensive foibles.
It is also indisputable that Anthony Davis makes eye popping highlight reel defensive plays, but if there are a hundred possessions in a game and those happen only four times, the other ninety-six can outweigh them in a measurement of the full hundred, and it so happens in this case that they have.
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That’s it, thanks for reading! :)
