Thinking Basketball Podcast, my name is Ben.

My name is Ben.

Welcome back to one of my favorite shows of the year. We didn't do it last year because

time is a flat circle in the pandemic and that year didn't happen or maybe there are three basketball years.

I don't know how many basketball years there were.

Anyway, welcome back Cody Hodak is here.

I'm completely sober if you're wondering but I am all jazzed up on defense, because that's what we're talking about today.

It is the second ever thinking basketball defensive awards, where we just go through and make up a bunch of categories

and try to talk about the best defenders in those categories. Cody, how are you feeling

about this? You said this is your like favorite episode? I dreaded this

episode since you told me about it like weeks ago. I'm like oh my god I mean it's it's that

one topic that you bring up and everyone just loses their minds you bring up defense and all of a sudden there's

theories and thoughts flung all over the place and people get really worked up about it so I've called myself down

But I've been very stressed about this for a while.

Stress-inducing topic, the defense.

So yeah, I think the main thing that stressed me out when you brought this up, like I said,

everyone loses their minds about it

but with defense like there's just there's so many players there's somebody really high-level

defenders and this is like the one thing that like when we're talking about offense like you can easily look up efficiency you can pull up some driving stuff

But so many of these things just don't have statistics connected to me right so there's not like an easy way to be like all right here's like what this a database is telling me here's a nice way where I can kind of

Pluck out some players know that I'm at least in the right vicinity here you kind of just have hearsay you have popular popular podcast calling out certain players, you have certain

Twitter accounts, like really blowing up there guys, and you know you kind of get lost in that and you're like,

...