The media votes on awards, and there weren’t really defensive stats to hold them accountable, so name recognition was huge. Not that the older guys you listed were undeserving.

Most of the older guys you listed were consistently among the best defenders in the league. They weren’t just rubber stamping all those guys.

More stars were two way back then, now they let the specialists do most of the dirty work on defense to get a break and go harder on offense.

game is faster nowadays which means more miles on players, to spare themselves from injury and so on players don’t do defense has hard. That’s my take

I think you just know the big names?

Michael Cooper? Mark Eaton? Bobby Jones? Pressey? DJ? Ben Wallace? Bruce Bowen? Eric Snow? Alvin Robinson? There are so many more but just off the top of my head.

There were just as many great defensive specialists back then, but the lack of NBA coverage and statistical analysis kept people from repeating the same names AKA the stars.

But the bigs like Hakeem TD were legit, they were manning the defense.

[deleted]

I think a lot of superstars are lazier on defense than the league once required. Or not lazy but, their focus is on offense

Kobe = Lock down defender.

Gary Payton = One of the greatest guard defenders in NBA history.

Jason Kidd = Incredible defender.

Kevin Garnett = One of best big defenders of all time.

Tim Duncan = One of best big defenders of his generation.

Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen = Both generational defensive talent.

Hakeem Olajuwan - One of the best defenders of his generation.

David Robinson, Patrick Ewing, Alonzo Mourning - All defensive studs who were also perennial all stars and 1st/2nd All-NBA caliber players.

So yes: the particular star players you mentioned were A+ incredible defensive players, along with other star players I added.

In that era Dennis Rodman would have been the most “defensive specialist” type of his era.

Dikembe Mutumbo maybe as well.

Originally big men dominated MVP voting. The DPOY was originally added to recognize individual defenders and initially favored guards because that’s who was typically guarding the other ball handling guards. When the flashier offensive players started winning MVPs the DPOY has morphed into an award that rewards “defense first” type players. People can debate whether LeBron has deserved one, but I feel like the fact Anthony Davis hasn’t won it in his healthy years shows it’s kind of a bullshit award.

It used to be solely based on name recognition. Now it’s solely based on what the top podcasters are circlejerking on their platforms

They leaned more towards star player back then but the other side of it is back then offensive stars played more defense.

Personally, I think the NBA should add an All-Defense 3rd team.

Just want to point out that coaches voted on All Defensive teams until the 2013-14 season. And they couldn’t vote for players on their own team.

There’s a lot of comments here saying ‘the media didn’t even care!’, so I figured I’d add that they weren’t even the ones doing this.

Another thing to consider is that analytics were not popular back then, or even around depending upon har far back you go - some stats like deflections were only recently tracked, as well. Besides that, defensive stats are still the worst at their job of all the stats, and in some cases downright weird. Sometimes something like ‘the eye test’ really is the best measurement, even if it is also a faulty one. None the less, I’d trust the other teams coaches more than the great majority with understand who was actually great on defense anyway

The 90s and 2000s were a defense-first league. Terrible spacing, slow pacing, hard fouls, tons of post-ups and midrange jumpers. In the 90s, we routinely had guys averaging 4 blocks a game, and defensive-stopper hall of fame centers all over the place (Hakeem, David Robinson, Ewing, Mutombo, Mourning).

The game has completely changed now, and there is way more ability to dominate games offensively with the spacing and speed and not being able to maul players on defense. At the same time, defensive specialists stand out more with less true shutdown defensive stoppers. There are still superstars like Giannis who do both, but what dominates games has changed. So there is more room for a superstar to not focus on the defensive end and still be the most impactful player on the floor. And there’s more room for a plus defender to stand out.

The best players use to actually guard the best players.

Given how narrative driven all the NBA awards are (even more so than in the NHL for example) I find it so strange that so much stock is put into MVP, DPOTY and the All NBA Teams 

I think there’s probably a lot of stuff at play here

Defense is less individual and more team based

Analytics have become much more a part of the conversation

The basketball talent pool has overall gotten much deeper

Its just a byproduct of the rise in social media, everyone can jump on a podcast and make their case. Wemby did it with the mvp award and draymond spoke his dpoy case into existence in 2025. Also you need really high usage rate to match the numbers of people like luka jokic, having the ball more means you are spending significantly more energy then someone else. So to make up for this they tend to rest on defense and perform poorly to maintain their energy on the offensive side of the ball

You know how you know it’s less about the selection process changing?

Because alot of the elite stars not on the teams are not even close. They are legit not good defenders.

I’m gonna sound like an old man but the stars back then took more pride in being a “two-way” player. It’s just true.

The 2008 NBA 1st team and the 2009 All-defensive 1st team were the exact same players. You could never do anything close to that in recent times.

I honestly think something happened league-wise after 2016. When the Warriors lost and KD joined, the league became more concerned with high scoring, individual numbers, triple doubles. In 2017, Westbrook and Harden from what I remember were the biggest story in the regular season that year, nobody even cared about the championship.

Defense changed drastically in the years following 2001 with the rule changes. It took many years for realize the best ways to use these changes to full effect. That plus the rise of advanced analytics in the late 2000s/early 2010s have probably had large impacts to the nominations.

Kobe was a good defender does anyone remember when he got jacked up for that Olympic run and he realized that he was too bulky to play good defence so he slimmed down a bit and his one on one defending dramatically got better?

The game is far more offensively demanding and more defensively demanding as a direct consequence. As such superstars carry a much greater load on offense, while their surrounding role players are specialists in 1-2 particular areas of the game. Those specialists are typically the ones carrying the defensive load which results in more non-stars making all defensive teams.

2 things can be true at the same time. The stars gave more effort, and the league evolving has made it almost impossible for offensive star players to give that same effort one did in the past on the defensive end - especially so for perimeter players.

Defensively there are a lot more ground to cover in a lot less time now, with the advent of spacing and roleplayers with a lot more in their bag offensively than in years past.

And I will say this, i suspect some of the awards were slanted towards name recognition too. Less coverage as a whole and less advanced analytics meant that a Dyson Daniel or a Herbert Jones might not get the recognition they deserved and instead it went to players with bigger names.

Defensive awards voting has gotten much better.

It’s important to understand how much the media landscape has changed.

Dave Berri did an analysis (I think in The Wages of Wins) that showed how a player could get more all-defensive votes by scoring more.

If you think defensive stats are bad now, and they are, they were way worse in the aughts.

The blogging era in the aughts did a ton to change how basketball was talked about. Actual film study? The major media guys weren’t doing that. It started out being done by fans, maybe guys who played some college hoops, writing on various team-centric SB-nation blogs.

You can find posts on Silver Screen and Roll - so we’re talking about posts by Laker fans - talking about how absurd some of Kobe’s later all-defensive awards were. And they were god-awful. The earlier ones, fine, okay. But the last two or so were jokes, and he got them entirely on reputation.

It’s honestly amazing how bad most people are at eye-testing defense, and yet that’s all we really had to go on. Your typical voting media member in 2005 couldn’t watch a complex play and tell you who made the defensive error, and they weren’t watching the tape enough to even try.

But even in, I dunno, 2016 you had people telling you that Westbrook was a great defender and Steph a terrible one. Why? Because Westbrook looked like a great defender - he got up in your face and challenged you physically - but he also gambled a ton and drifted off-ball. Whereas Steph had the body of a teenager and people assumed you could bowl him over (no matter how many times people tried and failed) and was always in the right place on defense. People had no context for evaluating the relative merits of those two things.

To actually know who is good on defense you can’t go by what people look like, you can’t go by highlights. You actually have to watch a lot of tape. And in 2005 none of the voters were doing that.

And so, to be clear, I’m NOT saying that Kobe was a bad defender earlier in his career. But rather, it’s that people knew who Kobe was, and he looked like a good defender, and so he got votes. The equivalent of, I dunno, Gary Payton the 2nd - I’m sure that guy existed in 2005 (and an elite defensive perimeter guy who was basically useless with the ball) - but nobody knew who they were because nobody with a platform was paying enough attention and ringing the bell for them (the way Zach Lowe did for GP2, saying, before he clicked in with the Warriors, something to the effect of “If that guy can figure out how to do enough on offense to stay on the floor, he’ll deserve some all-defense votes.”)

Baseball used to have this thing where, if a catcher couldn’t hit, people assumed he was good on defense. There was this whole thing about “the myth of catcher defense.” And then we started getting analytics and it turned out that a bunch of these guys were not adding any defensive value despite their reputation. In the NBA, it went the other way: stars got a ton of extra credit for their defense.

The voting process did change in 2013-14. Before that, coaches voted on the award and that season, it switched to media.

Before the change, because of the different voting bodies, you had a couple times where a player win Defensive Player of the Year but not make All Defense first team. I believe this happening to Marc Gasol in 2012-13 is what prompted the change

On a much more speculative basis, Ben Taylor of Thinking Basketball once said on a podcast he heard stories of coaches not taking the voting very seriously when they were responsible for it. He said he heard stories of head coaches delegating to their assistants, who then let their kids have input, which could explain the prominence of more well known players back then.

Deleted my comment instead of editing it. Meant to say that the coaches (not reporters, as some people correctly pointed out) weren’t paying attention a lot with this award. And while some of the superstars who got all defensive teams deserved it (like Duncan, Garnett and Kidd), the ones who had a huge offensive load like Kobe, MJ, Lebron and Wade, were typically given credit for what they could do defensively rather than what they actually did most of the time. Those guys were so athletic that they were all capable of great defense when they were younger, but most of them were taking a lot of plays off, because they had to. MJ in the second three peat was not consistently playing regular season defense the way he was in the late 80s. Kobe in the post Shaq era was not playing lockdown defense all the time. This was all pointed out at the time.

I think it’s kind of an improvement, that dudes who may not be superstars get recognition for being actual defensive juggernauts. Advanced stats play a factor too, I would bet there were a handful of guys in the past who probably should have been on those teams over superstars.

did you really need to ask this questions like you can’t come up with your own analysis?