Who is the best overall wing in the NBA?

Miami Heat’s Dwyane Wade (R) steals a rebound from Los Angeles Lakers Kobe Bryant during third quarter NBA basketball action in Miami, Florida March 10, 2011. REUTERS/Hans Deryk (UNITED STATES – Tags: SPORT BASKETBALL)

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For an explanation of my methodology, check out my point guard post from yesterday. The only difference with the wings is that I found a way to account for a full season of Opponent PER and Net Defense stats for those players that were traded, so we won’t see the outliers that we saw in the point guard study.

Below is a chart of the Top 52 wings in the NBA. I took the Top 48 in terms of Efficiency Per Game and then added four players (Marcus Thornton, Tony Allen, Ron Artest and Ben Gordon) that I was interested in studying. As always, click on the chart to see a bigger version.

A few takeaways:

— Not too surprising that LeBron is out there all by his lonesome. He’s obviously a stat beast, but probably doesn’t get enough credit for his defense. That might be because he’s not always working hard on that end, but his counterparts obviously don’t fare very well against him and the Heat are so much better defensively when he’s on the court.

— After LeBron it looks like we have a group of seven players — Kobe Bryant, Dwyane Wade, Manu Ginobili, Paul Pierce, Andre Iguodala, Carmelo Anthony and Kevin Durant — who are all in about the same league. Wade, Kobe, Anthony and Durant bring more to the table offensively than defensively, while Ginobili and Pierce are pretty balanced. Iguodala continues to make the case that he’s the best star-quality wing defender in the league.

— As we move towards the left, we definitely want to be on the top half of the graph if possible. These are players that are average (within this group of wings) in Efficiency Per Minute but are bringing some defense to the table. The presence of Marcus Thornton and Vince Carter are a little surprising. Thornton’s defensive numbers were pretty good in New Orleans this season, but he’s playing triple the minutes in Sacramento and his defensive stats have taken a nosedive. (I used games played per team as the way to divvy up the stats for guys who played with two teams on the season, so Thornton’s numbers are a little misleading.)

— I thought Nicolas Batum was something of a defensive stopper, but opposing small forwards have a PER of 16.9 against Portland, which is not good. The Blazers are also 3.7 points worse defensively when he’s on the court. Arron Afflalo’s presence in the bottom left quadrant is also odd, though it should be noted that Denver was a pretty poor defensive team until Carmelo left. Carmelo himself played respectable defense in Denver (11.3 Opponent PER, 2.9 points worse when on the court), but the team as a whole wasn’t gelling on that end.

— Monta Ellis is pretty dreadful defensively according to these numbers. Opposing shooting guards average a PER of 16.1 and the Warriors are 8.8 points worse defensively (per 100 possessions) when Ellis is on the court.

— If you’re wondering about Brandon Roy, his EPM is 0.369 which is below average. His Opposing PER is 10.5 (very good) and his Net Defense is 0.4 (average). So had he been included, he would have been a bit below Richard Jefferson on the graph.