The Dallas Mavericks president of basketball operations and general manager said trading Luka Doncic for Anthony Davis made sense because defense wins championships. Is he right?
When Nico Harrison held his press conference after trading Luka Doncic to the Los Angeles Lakers, he was in a no-win situation.
Most people feel like Harrison, the Dallas Mavericks president of basketball operations and general manager, got the worse end of trading Doncic alongside Maxi Kleber and Markieff Morris and acquiring Anthony Davis, Max Christie and a 2029 first-round draft pick. Dallas also sent a second-round pick to the Utah Jazz as part of the deal.
Our DRIP model agrees, rating Doncic as the second-best player in the NBA and Davis as the 12th among those with at least 700 minutes. When you factor in Doncic’s age (turns 26 on Feb. 28) and success as the lead option in the playoffs (reaching the NBA Finals last season), it seems like a definite win for the Lakers.
So, there wasn’t anything Harrison could say at the press conference to convince NBA analysts and fans that he made the right move. He was correct in asserting that time will tell if he made the right decision, but, at this moment, the consensus is against him.
But what he said was still important. When an executive makes a move as monumental as this one, the process behind it is important. Was there something he saw that the rest of the world was missing?
And when Harrison spoke on the trade, he highlighted one significant reason for the trade.
“We feel that defense wins championships,” Harrison said, reiterating what he reportedly told ESPN after the trade.
If this is a key part of Harrison’s justification for trading Doncic, it reflects a process that needs updating. Because that adage hasn’t held up for over a decade.
Defense Won Championships
We can determine whether championship teams were more likely to be elite defensively than offensively by looking at historical offensive TRACR (O-TRACR) and defensive TRACR (D-TRACR), the offensive and defensive components of our rating system that uses advanced metrics and other factors to calculate how many points per 100 possessions better or worse teams are or were compared to the league-average club in a given season.
There are a couple ways to go about this. One would be to see if championship teams were more highly ranked on O-TRACR or D-TRACR. If a team had the best offense in the league but the third-best defense, you could consider them an offensive team.
By that standard, from 1986-87 to 2010-11, nine champions had a higher-ranked offense than defense, 12 had a higher-ranked defense than offense and four had an equal ranking in offense and defense. So, defense had an edge during that time.
That edge becomes more pronounced if you look at whether NBA champions were elite at offense and defense. To do this, we can look at whether championship teams were ranked in the top five in O-TRACR and D-TRACR in the year they won the title. That shows us if any teams were able to win a championship without being elite on offense or defense.
From 1986-87 to 2010-11, only 13 of the 25 champions were ranked in the top five in O-TRACR. But 19 of the 25 champions were ranked in the top five in D-TRACR. This is a pretty clear sign that constructing an elite defensive team during this time frame was more likely to win you a championship than constructing an elite offensive team.
Small Ball, Big Change
You may have noticed we cut off that data in 2010-11. What changed the next season?
The Miami Heat won the first of two consecutive titles with a Big 3 of LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh. And the team did so by leaning into lineups with Chris Bosh at center.
The Draymond Green Warriors rightfully get a lot of credit for ushering in an era of small ball. But the 2011-12 Heat really got the ball rolling. They often played lineups with a center who could shoot 3s and LeBron at power forward. It’s jarring to watch games from that era when some teams would play two plodding centers together for stretches.
The game became much more about offensive skill and shooting. Teams became harder to guard, and offenses became adept at forcing slow defenders who could only guard the rim into tough positions. Teams radically adjusted defenses or left plodding centers off the floor entirely.
This offensive revolution has led the game to a more balanced state in terms of successful team building. Since 2011-12, six champions have had a higher-ranked offense than defense, six have had a higher-ranked defense than offense and one had an equally ranked offense and defense.
In that same time frame, 10 of 13 champions have had a top-five offense and nine of the 13 champions have had a top-five defense. So teams built to win offensively and defensively have come out basically equal, with offensive teams having the slightest of edges.
This is a drastic change from the period of NBA history before it.
There was a time when building an elite defensive team was more likely to produce a championship than building an elite offensive team.
That time, however, has come and gone.
Maybe the league is about to experience a defensive revolution that makes the defensive side of the ball important again. But it seems like Harrison is claiming that defense wins championships based on old data.
There is no longer a side of the ball with a clear advantage and the best way to build a title team is by simply getting as good as possible on both ends of the floor. And it’s hard to accomplish that by trading a young superstar.
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