Chicago Bulls Didn't Get Memo That Defense Doesn't Win Championships Anymore

Defense wins championships. It’s a truism touted in every sport, and doubtless one that is firmly held by the Chicago Bulls head coach, Tom Thibodeau. He’s one of the best, if not the very best, defensive minds in the game. However, does the saying hold true? Does defense win championships?

What does history show? I looked at every team who has won the NBA Championship since the merger and where they finished in defensive rating and offensive rating to find out.

I used Dean Oliver’s “ratings” statistics instead of John Hollinger’s “efficiency” rating for the basic reason that the historical numbers are more easily accessible.

Both have the same basic premise, which is that what you do per possession, on offense or defense, is more important than what you do per game, as teams run at different paces, and pace can often lead to wrong conclusions. A team that runs a slow pace but scores on a high percentage of its possessions is “better” than a team that runs at a fast pace but scores on a lower percentage of possessions because both the team and its opponent are going to have, on average, the same number of possessions per game, regardless of the pace.

Here are the results: 

Year	Champion	ORtg	ORtg Rank	DRtg	DRtg Rank
2012	Miami Heat	106.6	8	100.2	4
2011	Dallas Mavericks	109.7	8	105.0	8
2010	Los Angeles Lakers	108.8	11	103.7	4
2009	Los Angeles Lakers	112.8	3	104.7	6
2008	Boston Celtics	110.2	10	98.9	1
2007	San Antonio Spurs	109.2	5	99.9	2
2006	Miami Heat	108.7	7	104.5	9
2005	San Antonio Spurs	107.5	8	98.8	1
2004	Detroit Pistons	102.0	18	95.4	2
2003	San Antonio Spurs	105.6	7	99.7	3
2002	Los Angeles Lakers	109.4	2	101.7	7
2001	Los Angeles Lakers	108.4	2	104.8	21
2000	Los Angeles Lakers	107.3	5	98.2	1
1999	San Antonio Spurs	104.0	11	95.0	1
1998	Chicago Bulls	107.7	9	99.8	3
1997	Chicago Bulls	114.4	1	102.4	4
1996	Chicago Bulls	115.2	1	101.8	1
1995	Houston Rockets	109.7	7	107.4	12
1994	Houston Rockets	105.9	15	101.4	2
1993	Chicago Bulls	112.9	2	106.1	7
1992	Chicago Bulls	115.5	1	104.5	4
1991	Chicago Bulls	114.6	1	105.2	7
1990	Detroit Pistons	109.9	11	103.5	2
1989	Detroit Pistons	110.8	7	104.7	3
1988	Los Angeles Lakers	113.1	2	107.3	9
1987	Los Angeles Lakers	115.6	1	106.5	7
1986	Boston Celtics	118.8	3	102.6	1
1985	Los Angeles Lakers	114.1	1	107.0	7
1984	Boston Celtics	110.9	6	104.4	3
1983	Philadelphia 76ers	108.3	5	100.9	5
1982	Los Angeles Lakers	110.2	2	105.5	10
1981	Houston Rockets	108.4	5	102.6	4
1980	Los Angeles Lakers	109.5	1	103.9	9
1979	Seattle Supersonics	102.7	14	100.2	1
1978	Washington Bullets	101.3	10	100.5	9
1977	Portland Trail Blazers	103.2	2	98.0	5

With a general look, it’s apparent that most teams were good at one or the other and, more frequently, both. It’s not that important to lead the league in anything, though. There are seven teams in all which led the league in offensive rating and won the title. There are also seven teams that led the league in defensive rating and won the title. Only the 1996 Chicago Bulls led the league in both and won the title.

That means that of the 22 teams that won the title, neither led the league in offense nor defense. So you don’t need to be the best at either to win it all, but your chances are better if you do.

(You can’t just compare No. 1 to the field, you’d have to compare it to each individual rank. For example 13 teams won who were ranked first, 10 teams were ranked second, six teams were ranked third, etc.)

What gets interesting is when you look at how teams break down in terms of top-five and top-10 rankings. The pair of pie charts below shows how teams finished in the overall rankings.

First, here is the breakdown of how NBA champions ranked in terms of offense and defense:

As you can see, 66 percent of teams were in the top five in defense compared to 53 percent of offense, suggesting that it is slightly more helpful to have an elite defense than to have an elite offense. This is further supported by the fact that only six percent of champions failed to have a top-10 defense while 17 percent failed to have a top-10 offense.

Regardless of how you look at it, more than half of all champions were top five in offense, so it’s not like offense wasn’t important at all. In fact, here’s a chart that breaks down offense and defense combined. You can see only 14 percent of all NBA champions were neither top five in offense nor defense, while 35 percent were top five in both, and 86 percent were top five in at least one.

When you expand the criteria to top 10, every NBA champion since the merger has been top 10 in at least one category, and 72 percent were top 10 in both. Again, while there is a slight tendency toward defense being more important than offense, the question seems to be more a matter of balance than one or the other.

All of this shows that it’s not really so much a matter of whether “defense wins championships” as it is a lack of defense ensures you won’t win—but a lack of offense pretty much assures the same. Five teams have won a title with a top-three defense and an offense that didn’t rank in the top 10. Seven teams have won with a merely “very good” defense combined with a “very good” offense ranked between four and 10.  

The Bulls offense is presently ranked 18th in the NBA, and since Thibodeau came to the Bulls they are ranked 9th; however, that's with Derrick Rose. Without him, the offense falls apart. They are in danger of being a team that has great defense and not a good enough offense. 

Just defense doesn’t win champions. But to hear Nate Robinson at the end of this interview, it’s all that matters to Thibodeau, since that’s “all they practice.”

Thibodeau’s defense is superb, and his coaching over the first two seasons gives him an enormous amount of latitude. However, it’s time to take the offensive side of the ball a little more seriously. The Bulls have struggled horribly in the fourth quarter.

In each of their losses, they failed to execute down the stretch. According to TeamRankings.com they are 24^th in the NBA in fourth-quarter scoring margin, being outscored by 1.5 points. In their last three games, they’ve scored just 20.9 points on average in the fourth, which is 29th.

Compare that with Derrick Rose’s MVP season when the Bulls led the NBA in fourth-quarter margin. What’s the reason for the dramatic difference? Derrick Rose is the obvious answer, especially when you take into account that Rose was the second-leading scorer in clutch-time scoring per 48 minutes with 47.8 points and also an average of 10.4 boards and 9.8 assists. Rose accounted for virtually all of the Bulls' fourth quarter offense.

The Bulls—and this is not rocket science—need to practice their offense. They can’t rely exclusively on Rose’s offensive acumen any longer. They don’t have a “Rose” who can create points where they have no business being scored. In order to score, they need to work on it. It’s not going to just take care of itself anymore, because it never did.

Rose just took care of it.

Since they don’t have a great creator any longer, they need to create those points out of a coordinated effort, and that can only come with practice. I mean no offense to Tom Thibodeau, but this whole “no offense” thing isn’t working out. I just hope he doesn’t get defensive about it.

This season's stats are as of November 19th, before games were played.