What’s your All-defensive international NBA team look like?
Monday, May 12th, 2008
With Kobe Bryant, Kevin Garnett, Tim Duncan, Bruce Bowen and Marcus Camby being named to the NBA’s All-defensive first-team today, and no international players named to the second team, it got me wondering.
What does an all-defensive team look like it, if it was solely comprised of all foreign-born NBA players?
Keeping in mind that we’re not counting Tim Duncan or Raja Bell as international players, who would be on your team?
Would Andrei Kirilenko, whom has lost a step but is still a great lockdown and help defender, make your team? Would Dikembe Mutombo make your team despite his lack of minutes and his age? How about effort defensive players that utilize their energy like Ronny Turiaf and Andres Nocioni? Or players who consistently sacrifice their bodies to take charges like Eduardo Najera, and Anderson Varejao? What kind of global defensive team would you put together?
As for me, my defensive team would be begin with the hyper-competitive Manu Ginobili along with the long and quick Mickael Pietrus in the backcourt. At the forward positions are solid all-around defender Luol Deng and defensive game-changer Andrei Kirilenko. As for the center position, it was a close call between the shot-blocker Samuel Dalembert and the solid team-defender Andris Biedrins. I tossed a coin and went with Dalembert.
My second team would comprise of the fiery Jose Calderon, up-and-coming defender Thabo Sefolosha, smart and team-oriented Eduardo Najera, annoying-on-many-levels Anderson Varejao, and the aforementioned Biedrins.
No international players were included on either all-NBA defensive teams, but many received including Andrei Kirilenko (6), Manu Ginobili (4), Samuel Dalembert (3), Andres Nocioni (1), and Dikembe Mutombo (1).
Despite the fact that European players make up the majority of international NBA players right now (Players from Europe comprise approximately 60% of foreign born players), it’s interesting to see that many of the hard-nosed defensive players originate outside of Europe (mostly from South America and Africa). Well this is true in the list of top-15 that I came up with.
Check out the list of players and vote for your top-five in our discussion forum.
Sources: Kobe, Garnett top 2007-08 NBA All-Defensive Team Selections (NBA.com), Pick the five best international NBA defensive players (Ibn), NBA Players from Around the World in 2007-08 (NBA.com)
