There is no question that this is a golden era for offensive players. There is a lot of offensive talent in the league, and in the modern fast paced game, many players have been allowed to showcase their abilities. However, despite the numbers, there are many who have claimed that the scoring numbers are due to the NBA players’/teams’ lack of care on the defensive end.
Duncan Robinson has recently blasted that notion on a recent episode of his podcast, The Long Shot. Robinson detailed the amount of time and effort that teams put into the defensive end, and also mentioned that some players are literally paid for their stellar defensive abilities. (0:45)
I mean this when I say this: there is a ton of emphasis that goes into defense in the NBA. There’s hours upon hours of film study, there’s hours upon hours of drilling defense, rotations, coverages, all sorts of stuff. Players are held accountable in most circumstances if they’re not doing their job defensively. This idea that “Oh yeah, the NBA, nobody cares about playing defense so it’s easier to score 20, 30 points a game” is absolutely ridiculous. There are people that have jobs in the NBA, where their job is to play defense and they are paid handsomely to do it. So you can’t tell me that NBA teams, NBA coaches, NBA front offices, NBA players don’t care bout defense. It’s a bad take.
There’s no question that there are certainly very good defensive teams out there. The Toronto Raptors won the championship in 2019 while being known as a very good defensive team. There is certainly an emphasis on defense by some coaches such as Tom Thibodeau of the New York Knicks. The average fan doesn’t necessarily have complete knowledge of the work that teams put into defense, and it looks like Duncan Robinson is willing to correct people’s misconceptions on the subject.
