Thinking Basketball Podcast, my name is Ben.

Today is going to be all about defense.

That's right.

Everyone's favorite sexy topic on the basketball court.

And specifically, we're going to take a journey together.

This is going to be slightly different than some of my other shows that involve me sitting and talking by myself at the mic going through

research that I've compiled. This is research. We're going to go through research, but

we're going to kind of take a journey together. This isn't some comprehensive sort of statistical process that I'm going to present the end of here.

This isn't a deep long article with tables and things

that could look at all the different ways

to slice this problem.

Instead, we're going to go through great defenses in NBA history together

and kind of look for a handful of things that drove me on this journey, a handful of guiding principles,

and try to answer some questions that I started with that led me down this rabbit hole in the first place.

Those questions are the following.

One, what are the characteristics of great defenses?

And in this case, we'll just focus on the regular season

for simplicity or some kind of statistical simplicity

because when we get into the playoffs it gets a little

trickier to gauge exactly where teams are plus you don't get the same sample you only get half

the league every year and then only eight teams even make it to the second round

and things like that so we'll just stay in the regular season. So what are the

...