Nico harrison's baseline mantra of "defense wins championships"

His resume doesn’t imply he has any idea what wins championships

Year 4 and bottom half in points allowed? You’d think that would be a priority

I don’t expect we’ll hear much from him anymore once the Mavs are knocked out

A 6 foot 8 on ball creator and scorer the level of Luka is the hardest thing to find in the NBA. You can insulate a scorer like Luka with good 3 and D type wing defenders and lob catching rim protectors if he’s not a very good defender (he isn’t obviously) and still be very solid defensively as a team. Ironically he had started to do a pretty good job of this and then decided to deal him away

How is Luka a generational scorer?

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He's not entirely misguided. I saw a stat recently that said that 22 of the last 25 NBA champions were top ten in defensive rating at the end of the regular season,

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I just had ChatGPT look this up, but it seems accurate. Anyways, of the last 25 NBA champions, 22 were in the top 10 one offense and 23 were in the top 10 on defense. 14 were in the top 5 on offense and 17 were in the top 10 on defense. And the average offensive ranking was 5.84 while the average defensive rating was 4.88.

So based on these, unsurprisingly NBA champions are great on both ends, and both are obviously extremely important. And these my support defense being MORE important slightly, but it’s clear that with rare exceptions like the 2004 pistons (18th offense, 2nd defense) and the 2022 Warriors (17th offense, 1st defense), it’s pretty clear the defense was carrying the team, but similarly you have the rare exceptions where it’s the offense, like the 2001 Lakers (2nd offense, 21st defense).

That said, I wonder if even the little discrepancy in the two is overstated because a couple years ago, I saw an NBA metrics account discuss the difference in them the variability between offensive ratings and defensive rating. And there are is much more variability in offensive ratings. So the difference between a top offense vs. an average offense is much higher than defense. His argument was that made offense more important. It sounds reasonable, but I could see the argument that means defense is more consistent/reliable, so that is important.

In addition, I wonder if there might be a little more discrepancy here because these are the top teams, who are more likely to protect big leads while their opponents are going to have to be more desperate on offense to comeback. So it’s possible that this results in lower offensive efficiency for both teams on average as the leading team tries to maximize position time at the expense of efficiency, while the trailing team is just taking more inefficient shots. Now this likely wouldn’t have a huge impact, but given it would help their defensive efficiency but just hurt their offensive efficiency, and there is a pretty small difference overall between the two, small changes especially in opposite directions might explain a lot of the small difference.

And if ChatGPT is correct, then while the overall correlation between the two across the league was about -0.1 (accounting for 1% of the variance, it was -0.3 (accounting for 9% of the variance) for the NBA champions that would lend support that some of the difference might be unique to being one of the better teams. Maybe I’ll have to look to see if this relationship gets stronger the further you get from the average.

Overall, the idea that defense is important to championships was obviously true and this supports that. But so is offense, and at best the difference is small, and good chance they’re nearly negligible. But based on what Nico did and what he’s arguing, he seems to have taken something that was true (defense is important) and took it to such an extreme that it’s quite a bit further from the truth than he thought, if not outright false if thought that building a great defense was worth it no matter how much it negatively impacted the offense.

Luca is second in playoff points Per game behind only Michael Jordan. You can knock his defense, but you could not claim that he is not A generational offensive player

Good defense in tandem with good offense wins championships. You can’t win an NBA championship these days as a good defensive team with a subpar offense like in the early 00s.

Street Clothes could help with that