Can you win starring a bad defender?

Not anymore

Damian Lillard is one of many NBA high scorers who have poor defensive statistics. STACY REVERE/GETTY IMAGES

Some night near Halloween 2026, they’ll cut the lights in Portland’s Moda Center. They’ll play a stirring video in the dark. Bet on indoor fireworks, and then, ba-boom, the spotlight will find 36-year-old Damian Lillard as he’s reintroduced as the returned star of the Portland Trail Blazers.

A little smoke will linger in the air as the house lights come up. There’ll be a little delay—because there’s always a delay in nationally televised games—and then Donovan Clingan will take the center circle for the opening jumpball against an opponent like Daniel Gafford, Victor Wembanyama, or Zach Edey. The ref will toss the ball up, and next thing you know, the ball will be in the hands of an apex NBA predator like Kyrie Irving, De’Aaron Fox, or Ja Morant.

And that’s when the night will stop being fun—Lillard will get roasted early and often. He was a terrible, apathetic defender even in his athletic prime. Over Dame’s last three seasons in Portland, the Blazers were 29th, 30th, and 27th in team defense. On video and in advanced stats you could see Lillard had plenty to do with that. Then Lillard went to Milwaukee, where the Bucks had the league’s fourth-best defense before Dame, and immediately sunk to 19th-ranked defense in his first year, and then 12th the second. The Bucks bought him out in part because he tore his Achilles, but also because there was no reason to believe the Bucks could win a title after his return.

You can see why. Lillard’s playoff defense, or lack thereof, caused one YouTuber and doubtless several coaches to lose their minds, irate at Lillard’s unwillingness to sprint back, get low, fight for position, stay attentive, or do anything commonly associated with elite defense. No high school coach wants their players to copy that.

Now Dame will bring that approach, and an undersized 36-year-old body, to recovery from one of sports’ most invasive injuries. Kevin Durant says his right leg is still smaller and weaker than his left, six years after his Achilles tear, and that he “truly didn’t have enough power in my right leg” to shoot deep 3-pointers. He adds: “Your game and your body will for sure change.”

Meanwhile, I argue that stars who defend horribly have always cost their teams more than anyone cared to admit. And it’s about to get worse, because the Pacers just mapped out a 94-feet-of-intensity road to the Finals, and these guys who are used to resting on defense are uniquely well positioned to get played off the court in the future.

My whole career, the league’s points per game leaderboard has been more or less a reshuffle of the All-Star roster, the MVP candidates, Team USA, and the highest earners.

Buckets are fame, fame is money, money is buckets. High scorers = best players.

Or so they have long said. Scoring matters so much that I’ve had big-time NBA coaches tell me not to worry that some of the world’s best players—Dame fits a model with MVPs like Allen Iverson and Steve Nash—have been some of the NBA’s worst defenders. They just kinda need to do what they do. Let ‘em cook.

The game advanced, though, when Stephen Curry lifted a ton of weights, dug in, learned when and when not to gamble for steals, and earned his way out of Iverson-Nash territory and into defensive respectability. The league still had all these flamethrowing scorers who couldn’t guard a deck chair. But it got tough to win with those guys as your stars, in part because now you had to beat Steph and the Warriors, who won four titles.

During this year’s playoffs, I kept thinking that Tyrese Haliburton looked like Steph. Not just in waterbugging around the court and seeming never to miss, but also in really fighting hard to improve from terrible to somewhat OK on defense. That struggle means everything to winning.

And, I speculate: might mean the end of contending with an awful defender as your star. Kenny Atkinson has been sounding the alarm about teams emulating the Pacers and really ramping up the all-game all-court intensity. A successful and emerging technique is to go hard every moment of every game all over the court. This adjustment will expose the players who are used to taking a little time off here and there.

In that environment, only a sucker would build their team around a joke defender. Trae Young is in the last percentile of NBA defenders according to Estimated Plus-Minus. Collin Sexton just arrived to his new team in Charlotte saying he’s ready to start leading. Hope no one follows! Sexton’s in the third-worst percentile. Jalen Brunson is barely any better (fifth percentile of NBA players) while Devin Booker is in the eighth percentile.

None of those players, not Nash, Iverson, Trae, Dame, Brunson, Booker, Sexton … ever won a title. Real contenders don’t feature such incompetence. Shai scores more than all of them, and is a 98th percentile defender. That doesn’t mean the Thunder will never lose a title, but it really might mean that, without defensive improvement from their stars, the Hawks, Hornets, Knicks, and Suns won’t.

If you listen to the TV commentary, it can seem like almost anything can decide an NBA game. We’ve seen Dame’s shooting win playoff series. Sometimes they’ll fawn over Jokić’s passing, Steph’s ballhandling, or Giannis’ drives. We're in this confusing setup where on any given play, in any given game, any given night, every basketball quality looks like it might cause the win.

Bu that's more cheerleading than analysis, and maybe even a little dishonest. Because some qualities cause a lot more winning than others.

If I recall correctly it was the 2008 NBA preseason when David Thorpe and I bumped into an NBA scout in a Manhattan parking garage. It was the end of preseason, and we learned the scout had already been all over the country and seen all the contenders. David had one question: which team was playing that aggressive, organized team defense?

“The Lakers,” the scout answered. The Lakers won the title the following spring.

That day in the parking garage, David immediately put his finger on what ended up being the critical deciding factor in that season. No, you don’t get to the Finals being 27th in team defense, duh.

And the reason this matters more than shooting or posting up or passing is because that particular thing is literally half the game. If your game is drawing defenders in to swipe at your shooting arm, one player might get to the line out of that four times a game, for a total of a few seconds. (Scoring is 1.25 percent of the game.)

If you and your teammates know how to weave a leakproof defense, though, you can do that for 24 minutes a game each. As long as none of us is named Trae, Dame, Collin, or Devin. Because of their age and career trends, I suspect this reality is coming for Stephen Curry, Bradley Beal, Kyrie Irving, and James Harden.

It’s incredibly damaging to have one bad defender on the court in a playoff series against an elite opponent. And that’s only part of the effect. It’s actually much more costly.

Anfernee Simons is a dunk champion who, through hard work, turned himself into an elite shooter. He hit 13 straight NBA 3s. He’s a wonderful and graceful offensive force, and is evidently executing a plan to add to his game. Free-throw percentage is in some ways the NBA’s purest measure of work. Simons and Lillard were two of the league’s four total players who shot better than 90 percent last season.

So we know Simons had a plan and worked at it.

But, amazingly, for seven years, Simons’ plan has not included defense.

And we know who was Simons’ role model and mentor. Lillard made the most money of any Blazer ever, on and off the court--by a country mile. And evidently Lillard blatantly disregarded just about everything meaningful any coach ever said about buckling down on defense. Instead he stroked deep 3s, tapped his imaginary watch, and received the adoration of millions.

NBA players simply don’t get to evolve that way in Oklahoma City, Miami, or Boston.

Related: these awful defenders churn through coaches. Devin Booker will soon have his eighth. Tom Thibodeau might be in a bar somewhere telling people that he’d still be coach of the Knicks if Jalen Brunson could handle the Pacers’ intensity.

The future of the NBA won’t be kind to small players, to frail players, to old players, nor to players who aren’t serious about defense.

During a summer league broadcast last week, someone asked Blazers’ coach Chauncey Billups about the new trend of teams picking up 94-feet. Billups’ immediate answer was: we started that. I recently spoke to a current NBA head coach who is worried about other teams emulating the Pacers, and wearing opponents out with all-game intensity. Some teams, he said, are already doing that. The first team he mentioned was the Blazers.

On offense, the Blazers don’t have a superstar, but on defense they do: Toumani Camara. He’s tireless and present in just about all of the Blazers’ best lineup combinations. Playing alongside Deni Avdija and with an array of developing young players, Portland established a high intensity identity.

The problem was that two of the Blazers’ young stars--Scoot Henderson and Shaedon Sharpe were walking in the footsteps of Lillard and Simons, and were among the worst defenders in the NBA. The Blazers were close to putting together elite defensive lineups, but needed a few more players to buy in.

With his job very much on the line, Chauncey Billups had meetings with Henderson and Sharpe that Terry Stotts never quite pulled off with Lillard and Simons: fight on defense, or don’t play. (“Billups played a collection of film clips in which Henderson was torched on defense,” Jason Quick writes in the Athletic. “‘This is unacceptable,’ Billups remembers telling Henderson. ‘This is so bad … at this point, you aren’t even competing!’”)

Real coaching, at both ends, changed everything.

Scoot Henderson’s productivity ascended after Billups’ intervention. DunksandThrees

On a lot of teams, coaches navigate around superstars. Lillard quite probably could have had Stotts fired.

But Billups was dealing with younger, less influential players, and chose otherwise. He also had a similar meeting with Shaedon Sharpe, which really did result in Sharpe moving to the bench pending improved defense.

Those midwinter meetings changed their careers, and the team’s trajectory.

Shaedon Sharpe’s game also ascended after Billups made a point about focusing on defense. dunksandthrees

On January 18, the Blazers were 13-28. They finished the season 23-18, and their style of play looked completely different. They took on the frenetic intensity of Camara and Avdija. After Billups’ meetings, the Blazers finished the season--incredibly--in the top five in NBA defense, and third in transition defense, according to ESPN research. In playing 94-feet of high-intensity defense a plausible method to frustrate many of the conference’s superstars.

Then the Blazers added Matisse Thybulle (in advanced statistics, the team’s best defender) back from injury, Jrue Holiday by trade, and at least the concept of a healthy Robert Williams III, who when he plays is among the best defensive centers in the NBA. Kris Murray earned more minutes and emerged as one of the team’s best young defenders.

While Lillard is out rehabbing this season, it’s a good bet that the Blazers will make giant leaps forward on defense.

Just after the Bucks bought out Lillard, Dave Deckard of BlazersEdge--long a key voice in the minds of Blazer fans--fielded a question about the idea of Lillard returning to the Blazers. He replied:

The Blazers are a much different team now than they were two years ago. They’re young. They’re defensively oriented. Most importantly, they want to play at tempo and run. Even before he got hurt that wasn’t Lillard’s game. It’d be worse now. Head Coach Chauncey Billups would be yelling at his charges to get the ball down the court but Lillard would be walking. The Blazers would be screening and cutting while Dame dribbled the ball in place figuring out how to attack or get a three.

I’m not saying Lillard couldn’t adjust; he’s a smart veteran. But Portland’s style wouldn’t play to his traditional strengths even on offense, his specialty. And if you think the Blazers were compensating for Anfernee Simons on defense last year, wait and see what they’d need to do with Dame. The difference between him and everybody else on the floor would be obvious.

Good teams have bad defenders. What’s trickier is a star who’s bad on defense.

Can you really coach defense hard? Does Billups have the option to bench Lillard if he doesn’t compete? Could Billups even hold those Sharpe and Henderson meetings if Lillard were on the team not playing hard D? Can a Suns or Hawks coach really demand all-out defensive effort?

Poor star defensive effort tends to rub off. In the Portland example, nothing matters to Portland’s future except the ongoing development of young players. None of Jrue, Dame, or Jerami Grant will be on the roster the next time this team is in the Finals. Toumani and Deni have made great leaps forward. Contending depends on Scoot, Shaedon, Donovan, Yang Hansen, and Kris Murray ascending (and then nailing the awesome draft picks the Blazers have coming from the Bucks).

It would be one thing for Dame to return to the Blazers because he loves the city, wants to rehab near his kids, and wants to ride out his last years contributing to wins however he can. But there’s a clue that he and the team see Dame as more than that: he negotiated a no-trade clause, and a player option. He’s a leader in half the game, but the front office is treating him like a savior, which could make it impossible to establish a defensive identity.

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