Last Friday morning, before the Nets’ final preseason game against the Heat, Miami coach Erik Spoelstra was asked how big of an impact he expects Kevin Garnett to have on the Nets’ defense.
“Just do the research, probably,” he replied. “Find out how many teams he’s played on where he hasn’t been on a top-10 or top-5 defense. I bet those results would be pretty staggering.”
Spoelstra’s idea was a good one. The results were a little surprising.
Using NBA.com’s stat tool, it is possible to review team defensive efficiency rankings – how many points a team gives up per 100 possessions – going back to the 2000-01 season. Here are how Garnett’s teams fared in each of those seasons defensively, beginning with his years in Minnesota:
2000-01: 47-35 record, ranked 15th with 100.7 points allowed per 100 possessions
2001-02: 50-32 record, ranked 15th with 102.2 points allowed per 100 possessions
2002-03: 51-31 record, ranked 16th with 100.6 points allowed per 100 possessions
2003-04: 58-24 record, ranked 6th with 96.6 points allowed per 100 possessions
2004-05: 44-38 record, ranked 15th (tie) with 103.7 points allowed per 100 possessions
2005-06: 33-49 record, ranked 9th (tie) with 101.7 points allowed per 100 possessions
2006-07: 32-50 record, ranked 22nd with 105.3 points allowed per 100 possessions
As you can see, Garnett’s Timberwolves were usually an average group defensively, outside of a couple of top-10 appearances and one bottom-10 in his final season there. But if you look at some of the players that were surrounding Garnett on those teams — in 2005-06, for instance, the Wolves’ starting backcourt for a large portion of the season was Marcus Banks and Trenton Hassell — you can see it was a borderline miracle for a team with that type of supporting cast to finish inside the top 10 defensively (some of the credit, surely, should go to current Raptors coach Dwane Casey, who was Minnesota’s coach that season).
Here, though, is a look at how Garnett’s Celtics teams fared defensively after he arrived in the summer of 2007:
2007-08: 66-16 record, ranked 1st with 96.2 points allowed per 100 possessions
2008-09: 62-20 record, ranked 2nd with 99.4 points allowed per 100 possessions
2009-10: 50-32 record, ranked 5th (tie) with 101.1 points allowed per 100 possessions
2010-11: 56-26 record, ranked 2nd with 97.8 points allowed per 100 possessions
2011-12: 39-27 record, ranked 2nd with 95.5 points allowed per 100 possessions
2012-13: 41-40 record, ranked 6th with 100.4 points allowed per 100 possessions
The Celtics have been the standard bearers for defense around the NBA since Garnett arrived in 2007 and teamed with current Bulls coach Tom Thibodeau — then an assistant coach under Doc Rivers — to turn Boston into a defensive juggernaut. Even after Thibodeau left to run the Bulls, the Celtics had little trouble recreating the success with Garnett anchoring the Celtics’ defense. The only season the Celtics finished outside the top five in team defensive efficiency with Garnett was last season, when they were sixth, finishing one-tenth of a point behind the Bulls.
Because Lawrence Frank — who replaced Thibodeau on the bench in Boston before taking over as boss of the Pistons in 2011 — is now the defensive coordinator for the Nets, the expectation is that the team will bring a lot of the aspects of recent Celtics defenses to Brooklyn. But the most important thing they are incorporating is Garnett himself.
Will he singlehandedly lift the Nets into the top five in the league, a goal Garnett has set for them? Probably not. But his presence, along with that of Andrei Kirilenko and what is likely to be a more cohesive defensive scheme, does have the potential to move the Nets from the low teens, where they were last season, to close to or inside the top 10.