Just an Offensive League? The Defensive Challenge for NBA Players

Kabir903

"Do players no longer focus on defense? Many fans believe that many current players are focused on offense and lack defensive skills, especially as the average scoring in the NBA continues to rise season after season, but the same intensity in defense is hard to come by. However, is today's NBA really just an offensive league? Do players really not care about defense? Let's delve into three environmental factors to better understand the main reasons for the decreased emphasis on defense among most NBA players.

Firstly, scoring is something that can be clearly reflected in the data, and it's also the key to players signing multi-million-dollar contracts. In today's high-scoring era of the NBA, the return on investment for honing offensive skills is still higher than that for defense. When a player has outstanding offensive ability, regardless of their defensive skills, they can secure contracts. If they also possess some defensive ability, it's even better, as it opens up opportunities for them to command higher salaries.

Secondly, defense is a skill that is difficult to quantify with specific statistics. While we can tell whether a player is a good or bad defender, it's challenging to accurately assess what constitutes good defense. When agents negotiate new contracts for players, they often start with data and player comparisons. However, compared to offense, defense is harder to clearly demonstrate. Therefore, when evaluating players, defense is often perceived as a vague concept.

Basketball has always been offense-oriented, and the NBA is an offense-focused league. Players can score 110 points in a game, while excellent defense might only prevent the opponent from scoring 20 points less, but poor defense could lead to conceding an additional 20 points. From a broader perspective, these 20 points roughly equate to 10% of the total points scored in a game.

Hence, the impact of defensive ability on a game remains relatively low, while offensive ability can have a much broader impact on the game's outcome. A team with excellent defense but inadequate offensive capabilities might lose every game. Even with great defense, if they can only score 80 points, they will still concede points, while having a sufficient number of offensive possessions can accumulate a certain number of points. In this view, we can see that offense is the ""language"" of basketball games, while defense is just the ""accent."""