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Missing your free throws. Thinking basketball podcast, my name is Ben. Welcome back to another episode happy new year

it's 2019 first episode of 2019 and I guess fitting for me to point out the calendar

because today I want to talk about a trend that is taking place possibly in 2019

maybe it's a larger shift we're seeing and that is around the value of individual defenders.

Individual defenders from my perspective have always been undervalued.

It's something I talked a lot about in my all-time player series and in fact in the post-mortem of that series

stuck in there somewhere when talking about the value of defense is some data and some studies that I've run on

individual defenders, big man defenders, how valuable are defenders relative to offensive players and things of that nature.

We'll get to that in a second.

But this idea has been swirling around, I think,

in the basketball intelligentsia for a while,

where back in the day when the paint was more clogged even

even when the three point shot existed 20 30 years ago you could still have these giant

...