Why “no one plays defense in the NBA”

Stop me if you've heard this one before, no one plays defense in the NBA anymore. That's what I'm told like every day. I hear this talked about all the time. We certainly get plenty of comments on it on all our videos. Thanks for that. And take this Instagram video by Caleb Nash Feimster. I think this is a common perception of how defense has evolved over the years. By the way, it wasn't that physical in the 90s or that much fighting in the 90s. That was more like 70s and 80s fights of that level. But notice the 2020s. When we get to the 2020s, there's a red carpet to the rim. He has the big in the corner doing some kind of plyometric dance. And there's a ref in the bit to include the phantom foul. And so I think there's this idea that no one plays defense anymore. That they used to play defense in older eras. And the story is not only way more complicated, but we may actually be seeing the very best defense ever played right now. Guys don't know how to play post defense. When have somebody pressured Nicola Yoke is bringing the ball up the floor. You let him dribble the ball up the floor willingly, throw the ball to the wing. Of course, they're going to be good. You let him do what he want to do. Okay, so where does this perception come from? I mean, the obvious place to start is that scoring is up. So when more points go on the scoreboard, I get it. It looks like defenses are absolutely losing this battle. A 135-125 game is obviously not a good look for a defense. And then we have stuff like 20 point per game scores, which was sort of like a cultural artifact. It was really important. Like, could you be a 20 point per game score? They used to be rare and now they're everywhere. In 2023, we had a record 43 20 point per game scores. Why is this happening? Why are there so many 20 point per game scores? Well, one reason that's influencing and inflating all of these scoring numbers is pace, meaning there are more possessions in the game. So if you have 90 possessions, you have 90 chances to score. If you have 110 possessions, you have 110 chances to score. This is why in the 1960s, scoring numbers were so insane. It was like 140 to 130 every night. But unlike the 1960s, today, efficiency is also at an all-time high. And efficiency has been on this steady rise for the last decade as part of the pace and space era. And the real thing to know here, the most mind-blowing thing to know here, is that in 1987, Magic Johnson's Lakers set the all-time mark for efficiency at about 115 points per 100 possessions. And that 115 mark was the gold standard for like three straight decades. And all of a sudden, in the last few years, the league average has started to improve. 108, 110, 111. To the point where the league average, almost overnight, is now as efficient as Magic Johnson's 1987 Showtime Lakers. That Showtime team that was the gold standard for over 30 years. That's crazy. That's how much has changed, right? How could this possibly be happening? Now, one of the first things that people point to, one of the first reasons for this massive change, besides some of the stuff we're going to talk about on offense, is the officiating. It's the way the game is played. You remember that Instagram video where the ref was there for the soft phantom foul? So, the big question to start with is, has too much physicality been taken out of the game? Are defenders allowed to really play defense anymore? I asked two-time All-League defender Shane Battier this very question. Is it true that no one plays defense in today's NBA? I don't know if they're allowed to. I don't know if they're allowed to play defense in today's NBA. We have a 30-minute video on this channel alone on the evolution of NBA rules and how they almost always make it easier for the offense to score. The poor defenders get left behind. You know, I used to be able to really get up and guys. And so, on the catch, I can make their catches really difficult. And in my opinion, that is where we've sort of lost something as a league. Take the gather step, for example, right? That used to not be a thing. In the old days, your two steps started as you finished your last dribble. So, as the ball came out of your hand, your first step count started, and you only got two of those steps. Today, you can take an unlimited amount of steps before you gather it, and then you get two full, long jumping steps in any direction. So, liberty with things like the traveling rules or moving screens, is another one, are a huge advantage for the offense that makes it easier for them to score that didn't exist in the old days. Get the officials to call it by the rule book. Stop the traveling, stop the carrying the ball, stop the moving screens, call the damn game according to the rule book, because players will adjust. It's such an advantage letting a guy carry the basketball or take an extra step. That's ridiculous. Call the game according to the rule book. I charted a game a few years ago. 59 moving screens weren't called. 59. 59? 59. In seriousness, this is something that came up immediately with Battier. The second we started reviewing film of today's game. How would you approach defending these two guys? You know, in the old days, you would just open and gap it and live with that shot. These guys hit that shot at a really, really good clip. Look, when Jokic is moving, this is a moving screen. This, it's impossible. It's a moving screen. So, first of all, when guys that big are able to move, there's no answer. No answer. So, there's nothing I can do about it. I don't think there's a good answer for that. Some people say, OK, we could call a moving screen on every possession. And that's probably not true. But the point is, there are a ton of liberties in the rules today that didn't exist in the old days that helped the offense. And the screens, in particular, are not a small issue because of how much offenses have evolved over the years to take advantage of all those screens. OK, so is it really bad defense if the rules and the interpretation of the officiating makes it easier for the offense to score, which creates the illusion that it's bad defense? But there is an offensive component to this as well, because offenses have been evolving basically since James Naismith invented basketball. I mean, think about all the evolutionary advances that are at the soul of this game. The Eurostep, the crossover dribble, the spaced out offenses. I mean, heck, even the jump shot itself. You remember that old thing? We used to have set shots. That was a huge evolutionary jump in the game. And check this out. It had major naysayers, just like everything else, even way back in 1956. Here's 13-year pro Chick Rizer on the evolution of the jump shot. Here we go. It used to be beautiful to watch. The jump shot has made basketball less interesting, both for spectators and players. It's a breakneck contest now. You grab it, run and shoot. And playing defense, which was once an art, is all but forgotten. Change a few words in there, and that rant applies to different eras. The individualism of the 1980s, or isolation basketball in the 90s or 2000s, or wait for it, jump shooting again in the 2010s. But I don't think the NBA all of a sudden is going to have a bunch of three-point shooters and playing a bunch of small lineups. And every time someone laments all these changes in the sport, it comes back to what Chick said at the end there, that no one plays defense. Do I sound like an old man when I say that? So if you take the perspective that defense gets worse every time offense advances, then defense has been getting worse for the whole history of the sport. I mean, using our best estimates, teams scored about 92 points per possession in 1965, 98 in 1975, 108 in 1985. Then they apparently remembered how to play defense again in the late 90s and early 2000s. Then they forgot until they basically stopped trying over the last few years when we hit that 115 offensive rating mark. Obviously, the other option here is that the offenses are evolving faster than the defenses can keep up with. Through the 90s and into the early 2000s for sure, and maybe even longer, the defense was ahead of the offense. And part of that was that people were not focused on putting a lot of shooting on the floor. Part of it was the pace of the game. Part of it was the rules and the way they were enforced. I mean, the game was a lot more physical. The hand-checking was part of it. And so the defense was way ahead of the offense. Rapid advancements in offense make a ton of sense to me because we have more technology than ever. We have more coaches than ever. There are two rows of coaches. And maybe most importantly, we can build off the strategies of the past, right? We can go back and look at a team like the 2004 Pistons, who may have been the best defense ever. I mean, statistically, they're certainly in the conversation. And that Pistons team figured out, hey, if we pack the paint and put a bunch of length in the lane, we can clog up the high-value area for other teams and make them take long twos. And offenses looked at that and kind of realized the counter here is not to take long twos. It's to take more threes. That opens the spacing on the court and makes it harder for them to guard. But the only way to get to a place where your team can play that way is to prioritize skill. It's to play more skilled players that can shoot and pass and handle and attack and use all that space. And it's to develop more skilled players who can play that style that takes away that defensive advantage. Yeah, look, I mean, I think, you know, you hit it on the head. I mean, the thing that's changed is the number of skilled players out there. Look, the skill level is all-time high, okay? So I will always say that. Like the athleticism, the skill of these players now, way better. Even like when I played, you know, 10 years ago. Just everybody can handle, everybody can shoot. And just the offensive nuance is like unbelievable. So for a really long time, everyone played the same way because the two-point shot was king. There was no ability to manipulate the space or change the floor like this. And then we had this Cambrian explosion basically in the mid-2000s which culminated into the pace and space era with the Steve Kerr Warriors and Steph Curry and all that motion and shooting. But those Mike D'Antoni principles of space the floor out, play fast, shoot threes, and put your most skilled players on the court really started to change and escalate this arms race between the offense and the defense. The more point guards you have on the team, the better your team's going to be. Whether that's a point center, you know, there's a lot of guys that are point guards. Anytime you have the ball in your hand, you're the point guard. And so if that ball moves around you have in your hand, if you're not shooting it, if you're going to make a play, you're the point guard. And so if you have five guys that can do that, just think how good your team is. And that's why our Golden State's so good. They have a lot of guys that can make plays. We've called all these changes pace and space, but it's really skill ball. It's a transformation from this grinding post-oriented game near the basket to this spaced out pick and roll dominated game starting possessions way out near half court. And as a result, defenses have had to change, literally, how they defend these possessions because the old ways just wouldn't work. The rules and the way the game's officiated and the skill of the players has made it very, very hard to defend one-on-one. I mean, to just go out there and as you say, slap the floor. Now I'm going to D you up and keep you out of the paint. Well, that's not going to happen very easily. Remember, defenders could be more physical on the outside in prior eras and they had to be super stationary when they set those screens. So that combination has made it much harder to guard today's actions than some simple post-up or isolation game. A hundred percent. And it's way hard, way more difficult. You know, when these guys had the ball in their hands and it's off the bounce, you just can't really pressure them too far from the basket. They're going to blow by you or they're going to go off foul. And so it was a much more off the catch game when I played, obviously. It's way more off the bounce now. Everybody plays off the bounce. And so trying to evolve as a defender and figure out how to best mitigate these guys. Mitigates the perfect word there because defenses have just been scrambling for a while to try to figure out how to stop these innovations. Listen to Shane describe what was hardest for him to defend back when he played. If a team was really attack oriented, you know, so I'm thinking like, you know, old school Phoenix Suns where every like every cut was live. Every pick and roll was live. You know, they're looking to score. They're looking to get a shot instead of running this kind of false action. That puts a different pressure on the defense. That right there. That is how most offenses are playing today. There are these quick aggressive attacks looking for a shot right away with four or even five skilled ball handlers and shooters all on the court at the same time. Like that's what made Phoenix back in the day with Nash and Barbosa and Amari so tough to guard. Everything is live. But it's so much more difficult, you know, when every cut's live. Like that's that's like the thing I fear the most as a defender. This concept of every cut being live came up when reviewing film with Cavs associate head coach Johnny Bryant this year. And I asked him about their record-setting offense and whether all their cuts are live like this. Yeah, everything is live. If you start it back, right, when the ball goes to Jay here, stop. Jay automatically goes to the backside, right? But he can also play that front side action with Ty and George. So again, the five man beings, they're decision makers, right? So he has the individual freedom to play either strong side or weak side. We have different actions and different principles we look for on the weak side just to occupy the defense. Just like you see here. So it's not just that every cut is live. It's that every shooter is live on the outside too. The big men are now acting like point guards. And the speed of the game is just way harder to deal with than this slogging battle for post position in the 80s and 90s. This is what we've seen from the 2025 Pacers in their incredible playoff run because they play this style of controlled chaos basketball where everyone's moving at really high speeds, but they're all on the same page. You know, we give our players the concepts to make the reads, to be the basketball players that they are, right? You know, when you start playing in patterns, it's easy to scout. If it's not scripted, then it's a little difficult for the defense to know what's coming. So yeah, the officiating has helped offenses to some degree, but they've also figured out how to basically stress defenses to the breaking point as Mike Prada said in his great book about the revolution, the size of the court that the defenses had to cover has basically doubled overnight. So I don't think a lack of defense is really what we should be talking about at all. I think what we should be talking about is what defenses can do to slow down these unbelievable offenses. Think about what these poor defenses have gone through in the last decade or so. The league has made it harder for them to defend. Coaches have learned from the past. Players are more skilled than ever. They figured out you just set dozens and dozens of screens on and off the ball to punish the advantage that that can create. And then they get criticized for not playing any defense. To help stop the bleeding, one of the first things they came up with was switching everything because the switch nullifies the power of the screening action. Take what the Warriors did. It nullified great offensive players in the pick and roll like James Harden and LeBron James. The Celtics used it to slow down Luka Doncic in the 2024 finals. But the problem with that is it becomes difficult for the defense to dictate its matchup. It allows offenses to dictate the matchup, which then expose slower players out in space. And it asks players to remember way more tendencies for all the possible matchups they might have to guard on a switch. When older players criticize players today for playing differently, it's because the players and defenses today have to play differently to deal with these offenses. So defenders can't just cue in on a single player and remember a specific tendency. I mean, that sounds really good. And Kenyon, don't get mad at me, but have you tried chasing Steph Curry 30 feet away from the hoop? It's not possible. You can't defend him like that. And furthermore, there are players and teams, as we've seen in these playoffs, trying to deny the catch, trying to move their pickup point more into the backcourt to take away the space that these players can create to get the ball. In fact, this season, we've seen the average pickup point in the NBA move farther and farther into the backcourt. Defenses have busted out a ton of other innovations in the last few years. We've seen shot-blocking centers match up with wings and a wing on a shot-blocking center to help nullify more of that pick and roll action. The first prominent example of this was Andrew Bogut guarding Tony Allen, and that baked in another tactic, which was just to ignore non-shooters and roam off them to try to gain back some of the advantage that the defense could if you're not going to be able to shoot. Or another thing you'll see is teams will pre-switch the pick and roll before the screen is set to prevent that weaker defender from being hunted out into the action. And all of this has really been lost in the conversation about what's happening with defenses these days, because here's the thing. You can't play the way you used to play, or you would get destroyed. I mean, that's not conjecture. We know that because the teams that tried it got destroyed, and that's why they evolved and stopped playing that way. Twin towers and slower players went away. Roy Hibbert and the archetype of the stationary shot-blocking big man under the basket mostly went away, and this is because you cannot use these defensive tactics and survive. Remember what Battier said about going under the screen against Jamal Murray. You know, in the old days, you would just open and gap it and live with that shot. These guys hit that shot at a really, really good clip. Yeah, yeah, there's no good answer there. In the old days, you could do that. But the defenses today are getting smoked by going under these screens against all that incredible pull-up shooting. So that tactic really isn't viable anymore. And I don't know what the 2004 Pistons defensive rating would be exactly if they played today, but I do know it would be way worse because all of today's offenses are designed to destroy the tactics that they used. They are on the move, and it's much, much harder for your defense and in terms of rotations and things like that. And that's another reason, Ben, I think that all the movement, and it's sort of counterintuitive, but some sort of zone or combination defense actually may make it easier to cover the three-point line than chasing those guys around. And we're going to have to come up defensively with a way to play those guys. The so-called peel switch is another tactic that's becoming more popular where a help defender switches after a breakdown, and the original defender takes his man. And my favorite one of these is probably the triple switch where this whole thing happens in a coordinated dance. These are the hybrid concepts that Stan was alluding to. We just saw the Lakers play something that looked like a zone, but it wasn't because good man defense has zone principles. And similarly, we saw the Nuggets play a matchup zone that tripped up the Thunder by flowing and bending with man principles. An active zone should look exactly like active man-to-man, you know, in all reality. And the only difference is you're playing areas, but like, you know, this is a good active zone. Like, if you didn't know it, you thought it'd be man-to-man zone. What's happening here is that they start in zone, and it's their call to switch to man. Yeah, I love that. And that's something I always thought I wish my teams could do. It takes a very high level of either practice or concentration, you know, now, especially against man-to-man defense. It's brilliant. It's brilliant, and it's done its job. So defenses are innovating a ton, and the defense that's on the cutting edge of all these tactics is the 2025 Thunder. They start in zone and switch to man in the middle of a possession, and they may be the fastest defense in the history of the entire league, which might provide a blueprint to use speed not only to contain the ball at the point of attack, but to fly around and recover behind the play in all of these sorts of hybrid zone-like principles. I think we need to catch up as coaches defensively in terms of zones and combination defenses and things like that. Now, you have, over the years, seen things change. Like, I have never, I never, when I came in the league, saw anybody do what we would call a scram switch, you know, where, you know, we switch to pick and roll, but now the next biggest guy comes over, and we scram the guard out of there. It's been around for a long time now, and everybody's got it, but that was something new. All of these cutting-edge techniques have the Thunder, at least statistically, in rarefied air, holding opponents seven points below league average in the regular season, and then in the playoffs, they've held opponents 12 points below their regular season efficiency. And at least with OKC's talent, that's been an incredible recipe for bringing these futuristic offenses back down to earth. One final point to note. We have seen more physicality allowed in these playoffs, and it's limited offensive efficiency just a little bit, which I think goes back to Rick Barry's point about the other components of the rules. It's such an advantage to let a guy carry the basketball or take an extra step. That's ridiculous. So we've upped the physicality in the 2025 playoffs, but all those other rules haven't been rolled back to where they were in prior eras. And on top of that, of course, the offenses are still just brilliant. So the overall amount of change in the offensive efficiency has been relatively small by comparison. The biggest change that we've seen has to do with rim field goal attempts, where we're at an all-time low in the playoffs in the last 30 years since we've tracked this data. And so I think it's pretty clear that physicality alone hasn't caused the massive shift we've seen in offensive rating. And on top of that, even rolling back some of those other rules probably isn't going to get us back to where we were because the offenses have been so brilliant. Instead, I think it'll take more of these Thunder-like defensive tactics to counteract today's spaced-out game. The concentration on three-point shooting, it changes defensive spacing a lot. And it distorts the defense way more. And you have to be, I would say, a lot smarter and more anticipatory to be a good position defender with this increased space. So to me, defenses aren't worse than ever. They're actually better than ever. It's just that for the last decade, offenses have been like Usain Bolt, just leaving everybody behind as they go down the track. And so defenses look like they're losing badly because of how good the offenses are. And maybe, just maybe, they're finally about to catch up.