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

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 endure the swell of these views. This is Hot Takes We Might Actually Believe.

Last season, when Minnesota Timberwolves wings Jaden McDaniels and Anthony Edwards chased Boston Celtics counterparts Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown throughout a game between the NBA’s top two teams, I wondered: Would Wolves center Rudy Gobert — then it is threefold. Defensive Player of the Year and the betting favourite win the award again — even the best defender in his own team?

That led me to some conversations with front office people 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 more essential, shouldn’t the ability to shift across positions on the perimeter be the most coveted defensive skill?

Measure defensive effect

There’s no reason why teams should do the legwork to measure one type of defense against another. Who wins awards does not affect his record. Is anyone a good on-ball defender? A good help defender? A good edge protector? These are the questions. Ideally, one player does all three well, but in our imperfect world, teams struggle to find five-man units that canvas the court, as they say, “on a string.” A rim-protecting center here, some shifty wings there, just to mask the guard who can’t guard.

But could teams measure one aspect of defense against another?

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

You either block a shot or you don’t. Your opponent either makes a shot or misses it. Teams have access to a wealth of analytics beyond those publicly available, but even that can’t tell you everything your eyes are doing. Every possession results in a result, and stats don’t necessarily tell you how hard a perimeter defender fought through a screen or how much the presence of a rim protector impeded 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 extent — how many points each defender managed to save … right?

“Obviously,” said the Eastern Conference executive.

So, that’s what I was going 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 best defender in the NBA.

First, a bit about the process.

Calculating statistics

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

(STEAL + CHARGE) 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)

Quantitative rebounds

Defensive rebounds also end possessions, but grabbing a rebound doesn’t mean you’ve done all the defensive work to put away 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

* Possessions per game (league average)

**Offensive rating (league average)

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 a shooter’s normal percentage on shots during the season and the percentage on shots when the defensive player is guarding the shooter.” There are qualitative limitations to this data, including the luck of a shooter and the proximity of a defender, but it is important to quantify how much worse opponents actually were when defended by a certain player, and available statistics 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. Actual Adjusted Plus-Minus. It is an individualized plus-minus statistic, adjusted to account for the quality of players on the court for both teams. Essentially: How many points did each player save his team in the absence of box score data?

RAPM* x 1.02**

* Actual Adjusted Plus-Minus

** Possessions per game / 100

Points Defended (PD)

Add it up, and you can calculate a player’s Points Defended 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 by this metric. In fact, Wembanyama saved his team more points per game as a rookie than any Defensive Player of the Year has so far in the public data. (Which is only 2015. But still!)

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

Get ready for Wembanyama to rule

There is no question that 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, via BetMGM. Instead we should be asking: Can Wembanyama average five blocks a game? Only Mark Eaton 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 debutant.

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’s no reason he can’t push his 1.2 steals per game to two this season.

Then a David Robinson disc 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 best defensive seasons ever, along with Hakeem Olajuwon’s 1989-90 campaign. Russell would have something to say if they counted those stats back in the day.

Point is: Centers rule. As another Eastern Conference manager explained, think of perimeter defense as the pencil and edge protection as the eraser. If you have perfect penmanship and excellent spelling, you can manage without an eraser. “But if you have crappy grammar, you need an eraser. It’s always nice to have.”

Do you know what a good eraser is? 7-foot-4 self-described “a stranger.” Wembanyama is ready. You know it if you’ve seen him, France to a respectable loss against the best the United States had to offer in the Olympics.

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

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