“Offense sells tickets. Defense wins championships,” legendary football coach Bear Bryant famously said.
Enter Kevin Durant.
Durant, on Netflix’s “Starting 5” series, argued offense wins championships.
“You have to score baskets if you want to win a championship,” Durant said. “Playing defense, we can get any one of y’all in here to bend your legs, not touch the basketball, slide left and right, and contest the shot. That’s easy. But when we’re talking about winning at a high level against the best of the best, you cannot just do that and win a basketball game.”
Enter Draymond Green.
In an interview with The Athletic’s Sam Amick, Green was asked about Durant’s view on defense.
Amick: …Then you have the messaging from some of your peers, like when Kevin [Durant] shares his views about defense and how, in essence, he thinks anybody can do it.
Green: I think when you look at any team that won a championship, they had a great defense. And if you look at most teams that couldn’t quite get over the hump, oftentimes it’s [because] they couldn’t get stops. That fact still remains, and I think that those who don’t believe it, don’t win. It’s very simple. Those who don’t believe defense is as valuable as it is, they simply just don’t win. I don’t think anyone’s ever really been hell-bent on caring about the opinion of those that don’t win, because your opinion equals zero.
Amick: So I hear you, but Kevin has won.
Green: He won here, [and] the defense here was…
Amick: It was incredible.
Green: Absolutely.
Durant, responding to the quote from Green’s interview on X, clapped back with a follow-up question.
The offense also was incredible in the back-to-back championship seasons with Durant on the team. The Warriors led the NBA in offensive rating each of the three seasons he played with Golden State from 2016-17 to 2018-19.
But, the 2016-17 team was a defensive juggernaut as well. Their 101.1 defensive rating that season was second-best in the league. Coupled with their league-leading 113.2 offensive rating, they ended the season with a whopping 12.1 net rating.
It’s the second-best net rating since the statistic was calculated starting in the 1996-97 season, only outdone by the Oklahoma City Thunder’s championship team this past season (12.6).
OK, so maybe both offense and defense, together, win championships?
Green, later in his interview with Amick, noted that he and Durant have different opinions on basketball, and that offense is also highly important in his own play.
“But me and ‘K’ have had a million basketball conversations. So again, I know how he thinks about the game of basketball. His opinion didn’t surprise me one bit,” Green said. “But like I said, I also don’t view myself as a guy who just defends. I’m great at that — absolutely phenomenal at that — but I know that’s not all I do. Like, I’ll f— your offense and your defense up, and make your coaching staff have to go ponder, like, ‘Huh, how do we figure that out?’”
So, perhaps the question of “offense vs. defense” is a bit more nuanced.
