Thinking Basketball Podcast, podcast, my name is Ben. Welcome back. It's been a while. Today I thought maybe we would just do something I've wanted to do for a long time which is just spend a whole show talking about defense because nothing plays on the radio better than talking about defensive basketball.

And to do that, I asked old friend, the original guest, the OG himself, Mo de Kiel, from the other side of Los Angeles.

How you doing?

I'm doing well under the circumstances. Am I the original guest?

Was I one of your first guests?

I think you were the first. Yes. Yeah. Am I the original guess? Was I one of your first?

I think you were the first.

Yes.

Put that on the resume.

Yeah, that always, folks.

That will always go down and I can't have another first.

You're the only one.

Oh, man, you blew it there, but.

So, okay, so let's level set.

The idea of today's episode is that historically defense is extremely under measured

and under quantified we've talked about this before how hard it is to use data

or stats to really get a decent approximation of defense, especially historically.

But historically, we only really have two kind of even qualitative tools that guide us when it comes to defense.

That is a defensive player of the year voting, which is very similar to but sometimes

slightly different than all defensive first and second team.

So you get 10 guys on those teams.

It's actually hard to go and find the also receiving votes.

...