"Defense wins championships" might be the most overblown sports myth of all time. You could probably go right down the line with all of the ESPN analysts - Tim Legler, Greg Anthony, even the cuddly Steven A. Smith (wow, I just realized his initials are one letter short of "sass"). They will all tell you without hesitation that offense might look good, but it is defense that gets you the rings. But does this clich?© hold water?
Saying that defense wins championships clearly puts a premium on defense over offense. I have never heard an analyst argue that "offense wins championships." Before I attack this fallacy, it should be clear that there is a widely-held belief that defense specifically will get a team over the championship hurdle. Nearly every basketball analyst will tell you this. It's like it's written on the inside of analysts' underwear.
Now, if you have any concept of the yin and the yang - to go Buddhist on you here - this type of statement should immediately seem ludicrous. Fundamentally, in any sport or game, there are two ways to win: scoring points and preventing your opponent from scoring points. Essentially, offense and defense. It seems insultingly intuitive, but I doubt many people have really thought about it. The key, though, is that scoring and preventing scoring are equally important. Defense is worth 50 percent, offense is worth 50 percent. Equal. The yin and the yang. One cannot be more valuable than the other. So when highly paid television analysts blurt out that defense is the aspect that wins championships, alarm bells should go off in your head.
"Well, that's a very entertaining story, but real detectives have to worry about a little thing lawyers call evidence." Like Lois Einhorn (a.k.a. Ray Finkle) in "Ace Ventura," you might want some evidence to go along with the theory. The evidence is in two championship teams from the last five years: the Pistons and the Lakers.
To help analyze the teams' prowess offensively and defensively, www.basketball-reference.com provides a statistic called offensive and defensive efficiency. This statistic is a very accurate estimate of a how many points a team scores per 100 possessions (offensive efficiency), and how many points they allow per 100 possessions (defensive efficiency). If the analysts are correct, then teams that have won the championship should all be among the leaders defensively.
The case that supports this idea is that of the most recent NBA champions, the Detroit Pistons. The Pistons were pretty bad offensively, scoring 99.1 points per 100 possessions, only good for No. 19 in the league. However, their defense was good enough to place them second in the league, as they allowed only 92.5 points per possession. So we have a perfect example for the Steven A. Smiths of the world - defense is what propelled the Pistons to a championship.
The example I would point to in response would be the 2000-2001 Lakers, the soft meat of their three-year championship sandwich. Did defense win them a championship that season? That year the Lakers ranked No. 19 in the league defensively, allowing 102.4 points per 100 possessions. To give a basis for comparison, the Clippers were almost identical defensively, allowing 102.5 points per 100 possessions. How were they able to win a championship with such a lackluster defense? It definitely helps that they were rated second in offensive efficiency, scoring 106.3 points per 100 possessions. This is the flip-side of the Pistons' 2004 season. The Pistons were second in defensive efficiency and No. 19 in offensive efficiency; here the Lakers were No. 19 in defensive efficiency and second in offensive efficiency.
If nothing else, these two cases demonstrate that defense is just as important as offense. You can be bad defensively and win it all (the Lakers) or bad offensively and win it all (the Pistons). The key is that if you are going to be bad in one department, you better be the best or damn near it in the other.
Now that the picture has come a little more into focus, you have to wonder where exactly this line of thinking began. Most likely it was a statement that one analyst made, no one bothered to question it, it became accepted as true, and everyone else began to say it also.
A potential explanation is there is a greater focus on the offensive aspect of the game. This is probably a result of two facets: entertainment and statistics. From an entertainment standpoint, it is much more exciting to watch plays of a Vince Carter windmill dunk than it is to see Bruce Bowen play great ball-denial defense. It is also much harder to keep meaningful defensive statistics, or at least to quantify them. How many individual defensive statistics are there? Blocks and steals? Offensive stats like points, assists, shot attempts, turnovers, shooting percentage - they are all easy to track so they end up pervading the analysis much more. As a result, analysts focus primarily on offense and defense becomes this murky area that's open to dispute. When all the focus is on offense, it becomes en vogue to say something like "defense wins championships." It is like a fifth element that has the power to put a team over the top.
So what does defense win you? Nothing. It is just as important as offense - by itself it is not enough to win a championship. It is equally valuable, and that should be intuitive and also evident with the Pistons and the Lakers. So the next time a Sportscenter talking head slips in this little fallacy, hit the mute button for me and remember: "Fiction can be fun, but I find the reference section much more enlightening."
