It used to be solely based on name recognition. Now it's solely based on what the top podcasters are circlejerking on their platforms
The head coaches voted back then. You really think they didnt know who the good defenders were on the other teams?
Back in the 90’s and 2000’s the all defensive teams were consistently superstar level players. Kobe Bryant, Kevin Garnett, Tim Duncan, Jason Kidd, LeBron, Wade.
In recent years it feels like the selections are much more oriented towards defensive specialists, or players that aren’t high usage offensive players. Gobert, Derrick White, Caruso, Ausar, Chet, Draymond, Lu Dort, Dyson Daniels.
Were the guys picked in the past like Kobe actually the best defenders in the league? Or has the selection process changed where back then, voters were more focused on picking stars that were great defenders as well?
It used to be solely based on name recognition. Now it's solely based on what the top podcasters are circlejerking on their platforms
The head coaches voted back then. You really think they didnt know who the good defenders were on the other teams?
Most of the older guys you listed were consistently among the best defenders in the league. They weren't just rubber stamping all those guys.
For sure I don’t doubt that. But my thought process is, today, the award is given to the players that take the toughest defensive assignments every night and provide the most impact on that end. Those aren’t usually the superstars because they are already asked to do so much offensively. So were those guys back then taking the toughest defensive assignments every night while also carrying the offensive load?
More stars were two way back then, now they let the specialists do most of the dirty work on defense to get a break and go harder on offense.
Given how narrative driven all the NBA awards are (even more so than in the NHL for example) I find it so strange that so much stock is put into MVP, DPOTY and the All NBA Teams
did you really need to ask this questions like you can't come up with your own analysis?
Kobe = Lock down defender. Gary Payton = One of the greatest guard defenders in NBA history. Jason Kidd = Incredible defender. Kevin Garnett = One of best big defenders of all time. Tim Duncan = One of best big defenders of his generation. Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen = Both generational defensive talent. So yes: the particular star players you mentioned were A+ incredible defensive players. In that era Dennis Rodman would have been the most "defensive specialist" type of his era. Dikembe Mutumbo maybe as well.
Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen = Both generational defensive talent.
Almost hour long highlight of Mike and Scottie defending:
I think a lot of superstars are lazier on defense than the league once required. Or not lazy but, their focus is on offense
it's way harder to do both ways now, both on offense and defense, defending in iso on one guy isn't that hard everyone can do nowadays, it's the team defense that matters, switching, zoning etc..
The game is too fast for the superstar to be 100% on both ends of the floor. I think an good number of them can do it, but the regular season is too long and too fast to require them to do that night after night
They leaned more towards star player back then but the other side of it is back then offensive stars played more defense.
The media votes on awards, and there weren’t really defensive stats to hold them accountable, so name recognition was huge. Not that the older guys you listed were undeserving.
That’s a good point. Back then non-Detroit media might only watch two Ausar Thompson nationally televised games during a season. Whereas superstars had more national games, highlights, media coverage available. Now, media can watch every game, watch defensive highlights, and have access to much more advanced defensive analytics.
The media didn't vote on All Defense teams until 2013-14. Prior to that, it was voted on by coaches.
think it’s pretty universally regarded that some of Kobe’s were undeserving. his last stretch was coasting on reputation
game is faster nowadays which means more miles on players, to spare themselves from injury and so on players don’t do defense has hard. That’s my take
That makes sense, I can see that
Stars used to sell the league, so the ones who played defense were highlighted more. Not many advanced defensive stats were looked at. I also believe it went from coaches voting to media voting. A lot of defensive specialists back then were ignored by all-defensive teams. Its why resume comparisons are flawed IMO but I get why people do it.
I think there's probably a lot of stuff at play here Defense is less individual and more team based Analytics have become much more a part of the conversation The talent pool has overall gotten much deeper
Its just a byproduct of the rise in social media, everyone can jump on a podcast and make their case. Wemby did it with the mvp award and draymond spoke his dpoy case into existence in 2025. Also you need really high usage rate to match the numbers of people like luka jokic, having the ball more means you are spending significantly more energy then someone else. So to make up for this they tend to rest on defense and perform poorly to maintain their energy on the offensive side of the ball
Personally, I think the NBA should add an All-Defense 3rd team.
You know how you know it's less about the selection process changing? Because alot of the elite stars not on the teams are not even close. They are legit not good defenders. I'm gonna sound like an old man but the stars back then took more pride in being a "two-way" player. It's just true.
It's not about pride, it's about energy. Those 80s/90s teams had much more balanced offensive attacks and lots of possessions were wasted on sub-par scorers. Hierarchies are much more defined now to maximize each possession. Tons of 30+% Usage players when those barely existed back then (nevermind the huge difference in the TYPES of players and shots being generated)
You are SO goddamn close. The Warriors dynasty proved that jump shooting was a winning strategy. This lead to more space getting opened up on the offensive end, making defense harder. That along with increased pace and ball movement leads the league two where it is today. In order to be a great defender, it *has* to be your niche. Defending at a consistent level takes up too much energy to be effective on the other end. It's why all these superstars carry an insane offensive load, then refer to the team to put up a good defense. Buckets matter more If ANY of those stars from the 90's and 2000's tried to play the same way, they would get gassed by the end of games. Their play would suffer dramatically and it would lead to neither an all-nba or all-defense selection. In the modern game, players have to pick and choose where they spend their limited energy
The reporters did not take voting on that award seriously. Kobe is a great example. Could he play good defense? Yes. He did so in the playoffs a lot of times. Did he consistently play good defense? No. Anyone who says yes wasn't watching. He took lots and lots of games off on the defensive end to save his energy on offense. This was exactly what he was supposed to be doing, by the way. This was especially true in the years after Shaq left and he carried the entire offensive burden on his own. Some of the Kobe selections were ridiculed at the time. And its not just Kobe. Some of MJs all defensive team selections were fishy and the result of reputation more than anything. Both of them were genuinely great defenders when they were young, but were not among the top five defenders in the league in their 30s. Duncan, Garnett and Kidd were legit selections. But it is worth noting that they did not carry the offensive load that MJ, Kobe, Lebron or Wade did, so they had more energy to expend.
They were all like that but the coverage wasn’t available to showcase everybody so the superstars get the recognition off the cool steal or block. Defense has always been more than the stat but most people cannot understand what is good defense anyways. I’ll die on the hill that majority of two way superstars (excluding Hakeem TD KG kind of thing) are not worthy of all defensive teams.
Kobe won all his All Defense team awards before the media were the voters. Prior to 2013-14, coaches voted on All Defense teams.
I like a lot of your take, but MJ in his 1996-98 years was absolutely a monster defensively when still in his mid-30s. He could shut down basically anyone when putting in max effort (which was still regular then). Certainly Pippen was another level up defensively, but Jordan wasnt in and out the same way as you rightly point out with Kobe in his post-Shaq years.
The reporters huh? What if I told you head coaches voted on these awards? Do the head coaches not take it seriously
The reporters didn't vote, the head coaches did.
Originally big men dominated MVP voting. The DPOY was originally added to recognize individual defenders and initially favored guards because that’s who was typically guarding the other ball handling guards. When the flashier offensive players started winning MVPs the DPOY has morphed into an award that rewards “defense first” type players. People can debate whether LeBron has deserved one, but I feel like the fact Anthony Davis has won it in his healthy years shows it’s kind of a bullshit award.
Defense changed drastically in the years following 2001 with the rule changes. It took many years for realize the best ways to use these changes to full effect. That plus the rise of advanced analytics in the late 2000s/early 2010s have probably had large impacts to the nominations.
Kobe was a good defender does anyone remember when he got jacked up for that Olympic run and he realized that he was too bulky to play good defence so he slimmed down a bit and his one on one defending dramatically got better?
The game is far more offensively demanding and more defensively demanding as a direct consequence. As such superstars carry a much greater load on offense, while their surrounding role players are specialists in 1-2 particular areas of the game. Those specialists are typically the ones carrying the defensive load which results in more non-stars making all defensive teams.
I think you just know the big names? Michael Cooper? Mark Eaton? Bobby Jones? Pressey? DJ? Ben Wallace? Bruce Bowen? Eric Snow? Alvin Robinson? There are so many more but just off the top of my head. There were just as many great defensive specialists back then, but the lack of NBA coverage and statistical analysis kept people from repeating the same names AKA the stars.
2 things can be true at the same time. The stars gave more effort, and the league evolving has made it almost impossible for offensive star players to give that same effort one did in the past on the defensive end. Defensively there are a lot more ground to cover in a lot less time now, with the advent of spacing and roleplayers with a lot more in their bag offensively than in years past. And I will say this, i suspect a lot of the awards were slanted towards name recognition too. Less coverage as a whole and less advanced analytics meant that a Dyson Daniel might not get the recognition he deserved and instead it went to a player with a bigger name.
Defensive awards voting has gotten *much* better. It's important to understand how much the media landscape has changed. Dave Berri did an analysis (I think in The Wages of Wins) that showed how a player could get more all-defensive votes by scoring more. If you think defensive stats are bad now, and they are, they were *way* worse in the aughts. The blogging era in the aughts did a ton to change how basketball was talked about. Actual film study? The major media guys weren't doing that. It started out being done by fans, maybe guys who played some college hoops, writing on various team-centric SB-nation blogs. You can find posts on Silver Screen and Roll - so we're talking about posts by Laker fans - talking about how absurd some of Kobe's later all-defensive awards were. And they were god-awful. The earlier ones, fine, okay. But the last two or so were jokes, and he got them entirely on reputation. It's honestly amazing how bad most people are at eye-testing defense, and yet that's all we really had to go on. Your typical voting media member in 2005 couldn't watch a complex play and tell you who made the defensive error, and they weren't watching the tape enough to even try. But even in, I dunno, 2016 you had people telling you that Westbrook was a great defender and Steph a terrible one. Why? Because Westbrook *looked* like a great defender - he got up in your face and challenged you physically - but he also gambled a ton and drifted off-ball. Whereas Steph had the body of a teenager and people assumed you could bowl him over (no matter how many times people tried and failed) and was always in the right place on defense. People had no context for evaluating the relative merits of those two things. To actually know who is good on defense you can't go by what people look like, you can't go by highlights. You actually have to watch a lot of tape. And in 2005 none of the voters were doing that. And so, to be clear, I'm NOT saying that Kobe was a bad defender earlier in his career. But rather, it's that people knew who Kobe was, and he looked like a good defender, and so he got votes. The equivalent of, I dunno, Gary Payton the 2nd - I'm sure that guy existed in 2005 (and an elite defensive perimeter guy who was basically useless with the ball) - but nobody knew who they were because nobody with a platform was paying enough attention and ringing the bell for them (the way Zach Lowe did for GP2, saying, before he clicked in with the Warriors, something to the effect of "If that guy can figure out how to do enough on offense to stay on the floor, he'll deserve some all-defense votes.") Baseball used to have this thing where, if a catcher couldn't hit, people assumed he was good on defense. There was this whole thing about "the myth of catcher defense." And then we started getting analytics and it turned out that a bunch of these guys were not adding any defensive value despite their reputation. In the NBA, it went the other way: stars got a ton of extra credit for their defense. (And also: voting was public, and invariably media guys were using it to curry favor with stars or the home team. There's a reason why the first unanimous MVP happened once the votes were no longer public: used to be there'd always be some local media guy who voted for his team's star.)
The 90s and 2000s were a defense-first league. Terrible spacing, slow pacing, hard fouls, tons of post-ups and midrange jumpers. In the 90s, we routinely had guys averaging 4 blocks a game, and defensive-stopper hall of fame centers all over the place (Hakeem, David Robinson, Ewing, Mutombo, Mourning). The game has completely changed now, and there is way more ability to dominate games offensively with the spacing and speed and not being able to maul players on defense. At the same time, defensive specialists stand out more with less true shutdown defensive stoppers. There are still superstars like Giannis who do both, but what dominates games has changed. So there is more room for a superstar to not focus on the defensive end and still be the most impactful player on the floor. And there's more room for a plus defender to stand out.
Just want to point out that coaches voted on All Defensive teams until the 2013-14 season. And they couldn't vote for players on their own team. There's a lot of comments here saying 'the media didn't even care!', so I figured I'd add that they weren't even the ones doing this. Another thing to consider is that analytics were not popular back then, or even around depending upon har far back you go - some stats like deflections were only recently tracked, as well. Besides that, defensive stats are still the worst at their job of all the stats, and in some cases downright weird. Sometimes something like 'the eye test' really is the best measurement, even if it is also a faulty one. None the less, I'd trust the other teams coaches more than the great majority with understand who was actually great on defense anyway
The voting process did change in 2013-14. Before that, coaches voted on the award and that season, it switched to media. Before the change, because of the different voting bodies, you had a couple times where a player win Defensive Player of the Year but not make All Defense first team. I believe this happening to Marc Gasol in 2012-13 is what prompted the change On a much more speculative basis, Ben Taylor of Thinking Basketball once said on a podcast he heard stories of coaches not taking the voting very seriously when they were responsible for it. He said he heard stories of head coaches delegating to their assistants, who then let their kids have input, which could explain the prominence of more well known players back then.
The best players use to actually guard the best players.
Deleted my comment instead of editing it. Meant to say that the coaches (not reporters, as some people correctly pointed out) weren't paying attention a lot with this award. And while some of the superstars who got all defensive teams deserved it (like Duncan, Garnett and Kidd), the ones who had a huge offensive load like Kobe, MJ, Lebron and Wade, were typically given credit for what they could do defensively rather than what they actually did most of the time. Those guys were so athletic that they were all capable of great defense when they were younger, but most of them were taking a lot of plays off, because they had to. MJ in the second three peat was not consistently playing regular season defense the way he was in the late 80s. Kobe in the post Shaq era was not playing lockdown defense all the time. This was all pointed out at the time.
I think it’s kind of an improvement, that dudes who may not be superstars get recognition for being actual defensive juggernauts. Advanced stats play a factor too, I would bet there were a handful of guys in the past who probably should have been on those teams over superstars.
I don’t know. SGA and JB are not good defenders regardless so 🤷🏻
It's a different time. Back then, you had all around role players and some specialists. Now it's a lot of specialists. In the 90s it's a bunch of generalists with maybe 1 or 2 specialists. The superstars couldn't be a liability on defense because come playoff time you would be isolated. And the best players guarded the best players on the other team at their position.
more specialists now and we know about it
thats cause your naming some of the best two way players ever. These guys are not just elite defenders in their era, they are all time elite defenders