Defending "No Defense"

On your fourth grade AAU team you may remember your coach preaching the mantra: “Defense wins championships.” It seemed easy enough: Just stay in front the guy you're guarding. Hands up. Move your feet. Force him into a bad shot. Hell, if you're lucky, maybe even force a turnover. All ways to stop them from scoring. If your team does it, you win. In theory, it works every time. Unfortunately, theory doesn't account for 5'10 mustachioed 8-year-olds... with weird ethnic names... who score 50 points in their bad games... and leave you unable to wake for school on Monday because you spent all night crying into Mr. Cuddles. But I'm over it, I swear.

New Yorkers are a product of 5-minute fast foods and 25-cent tabloid newspapers. To fans here, teams are either the 96 Bulls or the worst thing to ever happen to pro sports. (Apparently, the middle ground was a victim of the Bloomberg budget cuts.) All but six games into the Carmelo Era, a 3-3 record had the Big Apple already calling for Mike D’Antoni’s head like John the Baptist.

What if every job carried the pressure of instant glory? I mean that type of thinking seems to work so well in the Sudan. They ask, "Why not the Knicks?" as if New York had come to expect a certain degree of success because of its history of second round defeats and failed championship aspirations. Patrick Ewing is not rolling around in his figurative grave. (Although he would make a pretty good Frankenstein) They’re not the Yankees.

Could we please cut D'Antoni just a little more slack? Wouldn’t you want your team to gain every ounce of knowledge they could from this guy? Whether or not the guy is the right coach, it is universally agreed that he is a top-tier offensive coach. And he's coaching on a team with two top-tier offensive players. Not the Starbury's or the Stevie Franchises or player X with a clever moniker and not so keen basketball IQ. In Amare Stoudemire and Carmelo Anthony, New York has 2 premier scorers. Having an offensive playbook catered to their skills could fatten up their stats like Baron Davis on the Cavaliers. (Come back to me in a year...)

Systems are created to cater to its best players. In Phoenix, Steve Nash was the best player. Offensively, he was a genius; giving the assist a rebirth of sorts. He made it cool to pass again. Defensively, however, he might have had trouble guarding the life-sized standup of his opponent, much less the breathing version. Amare came into the league looking to put up huge numbers on marquee players, admiring them so much he was nice enough to posterize them on more than his share of occasions. The point is, these guys didn’t come in to the league as Bruce Bowens, but the system won the games. You can’t turn around and push these circles into square pegs.

If the argument is that D’Antoni coached teams play poor defense then the argument starts to gain some steam, but I would counter with who on these teams were considered a good defender when D’Antoni wasn’t there? Did he make them worse? When Terry Porter, a defensive-guy stepped in, the Suns record was worse than under D’Antoni and Porter was shipped out like a used textbook on Amazon.

The statement “They never play any defense” seems to lose its grip when that same general New Yorker also claims that Derek Jeter is the worst defensive player in baseball history when defensive metrics clearly show that Chuck Knoblauch is. (Light up Applause sign here) Playing no defense would mean making no effort whatsoever. Playing NO DEFENSE would indicate that they just stand under their own basket the whole entire game – essentially a team of anti-Jared Jeffrieses. This just isn't the case.

Two statements:

“If Robert Horry didn’t check Steve Nash into the stands, the Suns might have won the championship that year.”

“D’Antoni could never win because his teams don’t play any defense.”

It’s funny how it can be common rhetoric that two contradictory statements are true. (Like the Xenadrine commercial where Ronnie from Jersey Shore says “I like to keep it real.”) Whether or not you believed that the 2006-07 Suns were Disney World-bound is beside the point; you must admit they took it to the Spurs that year. It took seven games of the conference final to determine the better team, a team without Amare Stoudemire who was punished by David Stern for standing up. (The ability to stand up quickly always peeved Stern.) The system won them 62 games in 2005 and the Western Conference regular season #1 seed. The system could win with the right players in place getting hot at the right time. Period.

Opinions aside, D’Antonomics/the run-and-gun/seven seconds or less system (insert Dwight Howard “Pause”) carries with it several facts:

1. Emphasis on point guards make for significant increases in assists. Assists make other players better

2. Role players tend to have their roles increased thus multiplying their own value to their teams (See: Thomas, “That Bitch” Tim) and later making them enormous sums of money (then eventually enormous sums of debt. See: Walker, Antoine).

3. Matchup problems are created when fleet-footed dominant scorers are matched up with slower larger counterparts

4. The teams are always among the top 3 in scoring.

So often are innovators looked at as imbeciles. It’s become cliché to point at Christopher Columbus claiming the world was round when everybody said it was flat, but I’m going to do that anyway. While the defensive ideology is nice and would make sense among similarly talented players, that isn't how the game works...

My personal system of rating a guy’s value is comparing them to the next available option. Show me the coach you’d rather have in New York. It’s just like when the Knicks fans called for a scoring center after the end of the “Wait, did he walk? Nah, he’s Patrick Ewing, they won’t call that.” era. Isiah Thomas brought you Eddy Curry and you suddenly realized that what was needed was an impact player: not someone simply possessing the silhouette of one. Firing D’Antoni and plugging in Terry Porter doesn’t put the Knicks any closer to where they want to be, it only sets them back. Show me championship pedigree and I will consider it but until then, the Knicks have in place a dominant coaching force. 62 wins proves that.

All those hard working kids that focused on getting their hands up? They're making clutch stops in the semi-finals of their YMCA leagues.

But the NBA? It's filled with those mustachioed 8-year-olds. The Knicks happen to have two of them. And they both happen to excel on offense. And they both happen to have a coach who pays his bills by maximizing such offensive talent. And while I know you don't want to disappoint your 7th grade coach, in the real world the best defenses don’t always win championships, but the best teams almost always do. And if the Knicks fail to get to that level, at least the system they play makes it entertaining to watch them try.