Does defense win championships?

I listened to the Pure Sweat Basketball Podcast yesterday and caught up on an episode featuring University of Washington womens basketball head coach Mike Neighbors. In that episode Coach Neighbors discussed many things which coaches (often unknowingly) do wrong. He attempted to MYTH-BUST the age-old notion that "Defense Win's Championships." His argument was that it was Effective Field Goal % (eFG%) that wins championships. When you go back and study the metrics, it appears clear that offensive statistics correlated much more accurately with how teams finished in the playoffs and regular season in wins last year in the NBA. 

• Looking at John Hollinger's ESPN statistics from last season: Cleveland, Golden State, Oklahoma City, San Antonio and Toronto (4 of which made up the conference finals) led the league in Offensive Efficiency --- while San Antonio obviously had 67 regular season wins
• eFG% Top 5
  1. Golden State
  2.  San Antonio
      T3. Cleveland, OKC, Clippers

Toronto was the outlier coming in at the 12th spot

• Defensive Rating (DRtg) Top 5

1. San Antonio
2. Atlanta
3. Indiana
4. Boston
5. Los Angeles Clippers

When you take a look at Ken Pomeroy's site: www.kenpom.com you see a similar correlation between offense and defensive efficiency and how teams finished in NCAA Men's Basketball. 

Final Four Teams are in BOLD:
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Adjusted Defensive Rating	Adjusted Offensive Rating
1. Witchita St	1. NORTH CAROLINA
2. Lousiville	2. Michigan St
3. Kansas	3. VILLANOVA*
4. San Diego St	4. Duke
5. VILLANOVA*	5. Kentucky
6. West Virginia	6. Indiana
7. Virginia	7. Iowa St
8. Valparaiso	8. Virginia
9. Texas A&M	Notre Dame
10. Seton Hall	10. Kansas

You see many more of the perennial powerhouses populating that  Top 10 in Offensive Rating, than you do Defensive Rating. Now this is not meant to make some grandiose point, the reading is simply to help readers question their assumptions and make people start to dig into cliche's or traditional statements. When you look a little further into the stats you see the winning teams are far from the bottom of the barrel when it comes to defense; they are typically very good.  However the correlation (at least last season) seems to swing in favour of offensive metrics. 

Thanks for reading, and check out the podcast with Coach Neighbors below!

Pure Sweat Podcast