It's Andrew Bogut week here on NBA.com Australia! Throughout the week we'll feature stories celebrating the career of one of the greatest Australian basketball players in NBA history. From a historic NBA draft day to his role in crafting a Golden State dynasty to his profound impact on the Australian national team, we'll examine Bogut through every lens to offer up perspective on what makes him arguably the greatest Aussie hooper ever.
Bogut's legacy | How Bogut became a No. 1 pick
What's the first thing that comes to mind when you think about the Golden State Warriors?
Dynasty. Steph. Klay. Draymond. Splash Brothers. Scoring. Small ball. Championships. Finals.
You could ask 100 different NBA fans and you might not hear the word "defence" uttered a single time. Every memorable team has that instantly recognizable calling card which stands the test of time. When meditating about the Warriors — one of the NBA's truly innovative teams that live on the cutting edge — the mind tends to drift towards those mind-numbing, knee-buckling, soul-crushing haymakers that featured flurries of Splash Brother 3-balls and seemed all but inevitable.
After all, those are far more entertaining than crisp defensive rotations, formidable rim protection and cerebral basketball IQ.
At their best, the Warriors are far more Fast and the Furious than they are Citizen Kane.
But for all of the pyrotechnics to add up to something substantial, it had to first build upon a firm foundation. That foundation early on? Defence.
Enter Andrew Bogut.
Take a guess at which team ranked first in offensive rating during Golden State's first championship season in 2014-15.
If you said the Warriors, you'd be wrong. That distinction belonged to the LA Clippers.
The Warriors did however lead the league in defensive rating in 2014-15, holding teams to 100.4 points per 100 possessions, nearly a full point better than the grit-and-grind Memphis Grizzlies, a team celebrated for their ferocious defensive intensity.
At the heart of it all? Bogut, the Aussie anchor who doesn't get near the credit he deserves for Golden State's efforts on that end.
Though Bogut earned All-Defensive Second Team honours in the 2014-15 season, Draymond Green was named to the All-Defensive First Team and is widely regarded as the player most responsible for setting the tone defensively. Green's unmmatched defensive instincts, ability to defend fives and play bigger than his size allowed the Warriors to morph into the devastating small ball until that blitzed the Cleveland Cavaliers over the final three games of the 2015 NBA Finals.
I'm not here to understate the play of Green, who will likely end up in the Hall of Fame someday thanks chiefly to his incredible defensive chops. But in reminiscing about that first Warriors championship team, it's easy to romanticize small ball while conveniently overstating its importance to Golden State's entire identity. The death lineup of Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson, Andre Iguodala, Harrison Barnes and Draymond Green — immortalized in the NBA Finals and during the record-breaking 73-win season — played all of 102 minutes, miniscule compared to the starting lineup featuring Bogut, which logged 813.
| Starting Lineup | Death Lineup | |
| Centre | Bogut | Green |
| Minutes | 813 | 102 |
| Net Rating | +20.6 | +15.9 |
The Warriors are remembered as a team who could switch everything and while that's true, they also ranked among the elite at defending the interior. In particular, this is where Bogut stood alone.
If you just started rattling off a list of the best rim protectors of that era, you'd probably settle on names like DeAndre Jordan, Marc Gasol, Tim Duncan, Rudy Gobert, Serge Ibaka and Joakim Noah before landing on Bogut. Although he led the NBA in blocks per game in 2010-11 with the Bucks, he never again ranked inside the top five after that season and never played an emphatic above the rim brand of defence we so often associate with premier shot blockers.
But even though the Aussie ranked just 17th in total blocks in 2014-15, nuanced observers would say he often held firm and altered far more shots than traditional box scores might suggest. The numbers back it up.
Bogut held opponents to just 44.8 percent shooting inside of six feet which ranked first in the NBA among over 100 players who defended at least 200 such shots. No other player on the Warriors held opponents to under 50 percent shooting, including Green, who forced opponents into 52.4 percent shooting inside of six feet.
The large red stop sign held up for all to see had residual effects on the rest of the team defence. Golden State's defence suffered whenever Bogut sat, as it got six points per 100 possessions worse than whenever he played, the largest such drop by any player on the roster.
It's true that Bogut's impact lessened once the playoffs arrived. But it's impossible to ignore the massive role he played in a historic regular season when the Warriors went 67-15. It's easy to forget given everything that would transpire in the coming years, but at the time, only six teams in NBA history had ever won more games than the Bogut-anchored Warriors in 2014-15.
He was the perfect centre for a burgeoning dynasty in the midst of self-discovery and on the cusp of enlightenment.
The views expressed here do not represent those of the NBA or its clubs.
