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Contrary to popular belief, NBA players do actually play defense.

The rules are set up to favor offensive players, especially now that freedom of movement is encouraged and defensive schemes are still scrambling to account for the plethora of threes fired up on any given night.

Good offensive players will always have an inherent advantage, as they force even the league's most skilled stoppers to react rather than force the reactions. The skill level throughout the Association has also risen to stratospheric levels.

But again, almost everyone actually plays defense.

Unfortunately, these five featured players don't help advance the argument. They still succeed on some possessions, but undisciplined play, incompetence in pick-and-rolls and general lethargy in off-ball scenarios take priority almost every night. They're indisputable liabilities on the less glamorous end.

To choose them in objective fashion, we're turning to a trio of defensive metrics: Basketball Reference's defensive box plus/minus (DBPM), ESPN.com's defensive real plus/minus (DRPM) and Basketball Index's defensive player impact plus-minus (D-PIPM). No singular metric can perfectly encapsulate defensive play, but grading out poorly in each of these three overarching numbers tends to be a clear-cut indication of lackluster performance.

So that we can standardize between three different grading systems, we're looking at every NBA player with at least 200 minutes and then finding the Z-scores for each of them in each of the three metrics. Summing those scores gives us the overall number listed parenthetically next to each of our featured sieves.

Here's hoping your favored franchise doesn't have any representatives. And here's definitely hoping your favored franchise isn't the one with two.