A quick google search of “Monta Ellis Bad Defender” will turn up a host of interesting web pages. The very first link sends you to 2014’s annual feature by Tim Kawakami naming the “All NBA No-Defense Teams” in which Monta lands an “Honorable Mention” spot on the dubious squad. The second link finds you reading a fascinating rebuttal on NBA Reddit titled, “Why do people think Monta Ellis is a terrible defender?”

Both posts are mostly reliant on the good old fashioned “eye test” with a few hard-to-contextualize stats thrown in, supposedly offering some measure of argumentative support. Kawakami notes that in 2014, the 37-year-old Vince Carter was statistically better defensively than Monta Ellis. The blogger on NBA Reddit argued that according to the NBA’s Player Tracking stats, Ellis was an above average defensive player in every single defensive metric he qualified for except for hand-offs and off-screen defense.

The thread underneath led to perhaps one of my favorite NBA Reddit comments ever by some Mavericks fan named sbeaty:

I love Monta and I will admit he he isn’t AS BAD as people think or say on defense. That being said Monta goes rogue way [too] much. He constantly runs to where the [ball] is or goes for steals. He throws off the defense and [puts] us into bad rotations. Monta reminds me of an A.D.D kid chasing a butterfly. He wants that butterfly so damn much. Go get your butterfly Monta!

Evaluating an individual player’s defense solely through statistics is imperfect at best. Obviously, a simple look at steals and blocks will tell very little. Even the advanced individual defensive stats are incredibly hard to quantify. Defensive win shares, Defensive Rating, and Defensive Box Plus/Minus all tell us some interesting things, and a quick look at the league leaders in those categories reveal that they have to at least be doing something right, but it’s hard to really define what those numbers actually mean. Player tracking data is useful, especially for evaluating how well big men protect the rim, but even SportVu has flaws – namely that it can’t really contextualize whether a player is competing against starters, bench players, or mop up guys.

Further, every team employs a specific defensive strategy meant to maximize it’s overall defensive output. Defensive players that are tasked with defending the other team’s best player every night will inevitably give up more points than their teammates. Other guys have larger offensive loads and are asked by their coaches to conserve some energy on the defensive end.

Indeed, our fearless leader, Jared Wade, had this to say about Individual Defensive Rating: “I honestly don’t know what individual defensive rating is. I mean, yeah, I know what it is. I just have never gained a lot of insight from it. It just doesn’t have context or much real value in and of itself to me. When someone tells me a guy’s defensive rating, it’s like saying ‘My house is 9 away from the school.’ 9 what? Miles? Blocks? Houses? Feet?”

All of these factors generally lead us to our current, flawed evaluation process that we employ when judging an individual’s defense:

EYE TEST

plus

ONE OR TWO AMBIGUOUS DEFENSIVE METRICS

divided by

GENERAL OVERALL PUBLIC PERCEPTION

equals

“REALITY”

Still, most NBA guys can generally differentiate between good and bad defensive players, and for the entirety of his career, Monta Ellis has generally been perceived as a bad defensive player. When you don’t get to watch a player every night, preconceived notions will dominate how you feel about him when you do get to watch him. Often, these presuppositions are spot on and helpful, but occasionally, they will lead to Pacers fans wondering, “Why did I hate Jordan Hill so much?” and “Is Jordan Hill actually a good player?”

With the roster turnover in Indiana this season, Pacers fans and writers at 8 points, 9 seconds have been trying to weed through these biases in order to more objectively reflect the current reality. It has often been said that “offensive reputations change a year too early because of recency bias and defensive reputations change two years too late because of confirmation bias.” This may be more true with Monta Ellis than any other player, because in 2015, Ellis has been a mediocre offensive player (where he’s supposedly great), but a surprisingly useful and above average defensive player (where he’s allegedly terrible).

In fact, through 12 games, Ellis has a total of 0.6 Defensive Win Shares, a number that would tie him for 18th in the entire league with Tyson Chandler, Ian Mahinmi, Eric Bledsoe…and Jared Sullinger. Again, who knows what these numbers mean? Certainly not me. But it seems at least kind of relevant when the only shooting guard with more DWS in the entire league is Jimmy Butler, especially when my eyes tell me that Ellis has been playing very well defensively for the Pacers.

I think trying to determine just how good of a defensive player Monta Ellis is will always be difficult, but I think one factor that often goes overlooks is the “Who does this guy play with?” factor.

For almost the entire first decade of his career, Monta Ellis played for exciting, uptempo, bad defensive teams. During this time, his backcourt contemporaries were almost always below average defensive players, or worse. In all, he never once played for a defense that was in the top half of the league in overall Defensive Rating.

Here’s a quick rundown of the teams he played for (while he was a starter) and his fellow perimeter defensive teammates.

Your eyes may have glazed over by this point, so here’s a quick recap. Over the course of nine seasons, Monta actually had the best DRtg (among perimeter players) on his team twice. He was the best defensive guard (exclude the small forward) five times. Of course, some of these examples would be akin to remarking that the second Hobbit movie was better than the first — that may be true, but they’re both terrible — but still, it seems those stats would mean something.

More significantly, the best defensive point guard he ever played with was probably Baron Davis when Monta was 21 years old. Over the past half decade, he’s spent time playing next to Brandon Jennings, Jamal Crawford, Jose Calderon, Rajon Rondo, and a young Stephen Curry.

On many of those teams, he was often asked to guard the opponent’s best perimeter player, all while carrying a pretty hefty load offensively. This year has been quite different for him. George Hill is an outstanding defensive player, one of the very best in the league at slowing down opposing point guards. Paul George is an absolute destroyer on the defensive end, challenging the opponent’s best scorer night in and night out. Ellis, in 2015, has had the privilege of defending the opponent’s weakest perimeter player every single night, and he’s actually been quite good in that role.

So what does all of this mean? It’s probably a bit of a reach to argue that Ellis has always been this good defensively. Players grow. They get better. They start focusing on the details more than they had in the past. In past years, Ellis did lose focus on defense to chase a butterfly or a steal too often. But he also played with some very poor defensive players that exacerbated his already poor defensive instincts.

It’s possible that Monta’s best years are behind him offensively, but it’s also possible that he’s starting to come into his own on the other end of the floor. He has incredible anticipation skills, he fights hard against larger players, and has made large strides in Indiana’s team defensive concept. Monta may not have it all, but he has more than enough to be an above average defensive player for the Indiana Pacers.