Thunder's Serge Ibaka's Importance: Defense and Rebounding Are Not Little Things

Jonathan TjarksNov 9, 2010

With seven rebounds, two blocks and the highest plus/minus rating on the team, Serge Ibaka was the key to the Oklahoma City Thunder’s comeback win against Portland last week.

TNT announcer Reggie Miller remarked that “Ibaka does all the little things that help a team win.” His comment, an uncontroversial reflection of conventional wisdom, was a good window into how people misinterpret basketball games.

Rebounding and defense are not little things!

David Berri, an economist at Southern Utah University, made a splash in NBA statistical circles with his controversial 2006 book Wages of Wins. After running a regression analysis to determine which statistics correlate with winning records, he found that teams overvalue scoring and undervalue rebounding and field goal percentage.

The next day, ESPN announcer Mark Jackson declared that Chicago should be willing to give up Joakim Noah to get Carmelo Anthony in a trade. But according to Berri’s Wins Produced statistic, which he used to beat ESPN’s NBA experts in predicting the NBA playoffs two years ago, Noah produces .27 wins per 48 minutes while Anthony only produces .108 wins.

While I don’t think Noah is twice the player Anthony is, the statistic is nonetheless revealing. A Chicago team featuring Carmelo, Carlos Boozer and Derrick Rose would be immediately seen as threats to win the Eastern Conference. But really, their frontline would be a 6’8" Boozer and a 6’9" Taj Gibson; you’re not winning a title with those two protecting the paint.

In the post-MJ era of the NBA, a scoring wing in the mold of Kobe Bryant, LeBron James and Kevin Durant is seen as the key to winning titles.

But there’s only so much a player who creates from the perimeter can realistically expect to accomplish as the team’s best player. He can’t defend the rim, he can’t clear the boards and he can only create so much for other players without dominating the ball too much. And without a defensively minded big man behind him, almost no one wing player can improve overall team defense significantly.

In the last five years, the following scoring wing players were on All-NBA teams—Paul Pierce, Anthony, Durant, Dwyane Wade, Bryant, Joe Johnson, Brandon Roy, Tracy McGrady, Allen Iverson and Manu Ginobili. In that time span, only once (Carmelo in 2009) did one of those players make a Conference Finals without an All-Star big man.

In reality, the road to an NBA championship goes through the paint. Tim Duncan and Shaq won every title between 1999 and 2007, except in 2004, when Shaq’s Lakers were defeated by the Pistons.

Since Jordan’s retirement, no team except those Pistons has won an NBA championship without an All-Star seven-footer—and they had the 6’11" Rasheed Wallace and the 6’9" four-time NBA Defensive Player of the Year Ben Wallace to handle interior defense.

People tend to overrate perimeter players because they have the ball in their hands a lot more than big men, and because they are almost always more skilled. But while Kobe is better at what he does than Dwight Howard is at what he does, what Howard does is more important to winning.

A team with the league’s leading rebounder and a two-time Defensive Player of the Year will be one of the best defensive teams in the NBA. A team with a wing player who can score 30 points a night might not even make it into the playoffs—see the 2005 LA Lakers.

In Tim Duncan’s 13-year career, with the entire roster changed around him, the Spurs have only missed the second round of the playoffs twice. That’s counting 2000, when Duncan missed the playoffs with a knee injury.

So, basically having a franchise-type center on your roster guarantees that team will be one of the best eight in the NBA. Similarly, I don’t expect Howard’s Magic to be knocked out of the first round anytime soon. They may not win a title without a legitimate perimeter All-Star (an aging Vince Carter and the tiny Jameer Nelson don’t count), but Kobe hasn’t won one without a seven-footer to anchor the defense, either.

While Howard should be a legitimate threat to win the MVP this year, many discount him as a franchise player because he can’t create his own shot. Yet no one discounts Kobe's and Steve Nash’s MVPs even though neither blocks shots or rebounds very well.

If Miami and LA meet in the NBA Finals, ESPN will cover it as if LeBron and Kobe are about to play a seven-game one-on-one series, when the matchup of Chris Bosh and Pau Gasol will be as, if not more, important.

The same phenomenon exists in football, where quarterbacks get the blame for the loss and the credit for the win. Someone once told me that Aaron Rodgers will win a Super Bowl before Tony Romo, as if that proves anything in a sport where 22 players start.

You can’t blame Romo for not winning a Super Bowl with an aging offensive line in front of him, and you can’t blame Iverson or McGrady or Kobe for not winning titles when they weren’t playing with great big men.

And if the Oklahoma City Thunder don’t win a title in the next few years, it will probably be because of a lack of development from Ibaka and Cole Aldrich. Not Durant’s “will to win” or "lack of a killer instinct" or any other such nonsense attributing team success to intangible measurements of the best player’s character.