Ranking the five greatest defenders in NBA history

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Kawhi Leonard

Reasoning: The best perimeter defender in basketball’s most talented era.

As someone who conceptualizes lists beginning with the number one spot and works his way down, deciding the fifth position on this list was challenging. With so many tremendous defenders to account for, this choice simply boiled down to personal preference. However, though players off this list like Tim Duncan and Dikembe Mutombo are undoubtedly two of the most noteworthy defenders in NBA history, Kawhi Leonard brings to the table what so few players have been capable of:

Unshakeable perimeter clamping.

In an era so heavily dominated by and skewed toward high-volume wing and backcourt scorers, Kawhi Leonard is the lone outlier with the potential to silence them all. Amongst active players, Kawhi ranks fifth in career defensive rating—a metric heavily skewed toward big men (case in point: Andre Drummond ranks fourth on that list). Within that active top-10, only two players are considered wing defenders—the other being Paul George, who grades out nearly two full points worse (102.76) than Leonard (100.85).

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Kawhi also boasts three seasons within the NBA’s top-six in defensive win shares—yet another defensive metric dominated by Dwight Howard’s and Rudy Gobert’s—for that particular season. Finally, when it comes to defensive box plus/minus, Kawhi ranks second all-time amongst active players, where he is wedged between Rudy Gobert and Draymond Green.

Even more impressive than his nearly unprecedented defensive numbers (again, amongst active players), however, is the fact that Kawhi Leonard is the only wing who has won the Defensive Player of the Year Award on two separate occasions. Sidney Moncrief won the award in its first two seasons as a legitimate NBA honor, but Moncrief was a guard, and the NBA was—for lack of a better term—weird during the early-80s.

Since the award began landing in the trophy cases of legitimately deserving players in 1990 (1987-88 aside, when Michael Jordan won his first and only DPOY award), only six non-centers have won the title: Kawhi (2x), Dennis Rodman (2x), Gary Payton, Ron Artest, Draymond Green, and Giannis Antetokounmpo. Of those six players, pundits can only mention Artest and Leonard as certified wing defenders since Green (and Rodman, for that matter) traditionally guards big men while remaining highly malleable on switches, Giannis plays down low in a center-field role, and Gary Payton defended point guards during an era in which point guards struggled to score regardless of who was in front of them.

The fact of the matter is this: In the most explosive offensive era in NBA history, Kawhi Leonard is tasked with shadowing the opposing teams’ most talented offensive threat on a nightly basis. More often than not, Kawhi delivers on that task. And if that’s not enough to convince you, maybe the memory of LeBron James reacting to Kawhi Leonard checking back into an NBA Finals game will do the trick.