One of the things that bugs me the most about the NBA is how so many great former players seemingly do all they can to cut down the current product, especially the guys who cover the league for a living, but spend most of their time complaining about the state of the game. What’s rare, however, is when a former player comes after a legend who came before them — and in this case, someone whose reputation is so bulletproof that the only thing gained from critiquing him is simply “attention” — but that’s exactly what we’re dealing with today. Four-time NBA All-Star Rasheed Wallace came off the top rope like he was Macho Man Randy Savage with a hot take on the defensive prowess of Michael Jordan that is so hot that I could feel the heat from the comfort of my living room.
I don’t necessarily think it’s Michael Jordan whose defense was overrated… I think that every one of those nine All-Defensive Team nods were warranted because MJ was indisputably one of the best perimeter defenders of his era. What I do believe is that ALL DEFENSE during that entire era — the 80’s, 90’s, and early 00’s — was overrated, and if that makes me an agnostic in the eyes of the Church of MJ, then so be it.
Watch any games from that twenty-year stretch in question (there are plenty of full games on YouTube and I assure you, I’ve watched most of them), and I promise you that you’re going see guys regularly stepping into wide open jumpers from anywhere outside of twenty feet. A guy attacks the basket, and sure, he might take a hard hit on his way to the rack. But is that good defense, or is that physical defense? And yes, whether anyone wants to admit it or not, there is a difference. Additionally, has the collective NBA fanbase confused good defense for bad offense, because from top to bottom, the league just wasn’t as talented from an offensive standpoint as it is right now?
Defense was certainly more physical from the late 80’s into the early 00’s. That cannot be disputed. The Bad Boy Pistons came along and mucked everything up, playing physical team defense that occasionally bordered on violent, in large part because of the scoring prowess of Michael Jordan. The Pat Riley-era New York Knicks grabbed the baton from the Pistons, and carried it throughout the remainder of the 90’s, with teams like Indiana and Miami following suit, again, in part because the guy they needed to knock off was Michael Jordan.
Things eventually got so carried away that the NBA had to step in and eliminate hand-checking ahead of the 2004-05 season, in large part because in the ’04 Playoffs there were games with the final scores of 72-71, 78-56, 82-64, 74-73, 73-70, 72-67, and a particularly disgusting Eastern Conference Finals game between the Rasheed Wallace’s Detroit Pistons and Indiana Pacers that ended with the final score of 69-65. Since then, we’ve seen a pretty steady climb in league-wide scoring, due to the new rules implemented that make playing defense more difficult, and because players are just much more skilled offensively than they used to be. If you’ve played basketball, you know that playing good defense is much harder not only when you can’t be as physical, but also when you have more ground to cover, which is the case now because offense has gotten so much better and more smarter than it used to be.
So with all due respect to Rasheed Wallace, who let’s not forget to mention peaked as a player during the era when defenses still had a noticeable competitive advantage over offenses, but he’s only half right here. I think if any of those “great” defensive teams from that era, including Rasheed’s Pistons, had to play defense with current rules, they’d be giving up 120 points per game too.
