If a player gets a lot of blocks and steals, there's a good chance he's in my personal top ten (e.g. Gerald Wallace, Kevin Garnett, Ben Wallace before the ring). Which is why I was positively delighted by David Friedman's article on the 100-100 club.Gambling on defense is typically frowned upon; how many times have your heard someone dismiss Allen Iverson or Gilbert Arenas's non-offense because they only go for steals? In this piece, Sixers great Bobby Jones explains why going for both is in fact super-helpful:
"I don't think it (going for steals or blocks) is selfish at all. I think that it's good. You have to put pressure on the offense because shooters are so good. The offense has such an advantage because it can initiate what takes place, so as a defender you have got to try to instigate something to throw them off and make them do something they don't want to do. The old term, 'pressure will bust the pipe,' is very true. It will make people change what they want to do."Again, I don't think this goes for players only after steals or blocks; that becomes easy to predict. But in the rare case of a talent who can do both, it keeps the offense on its heels for a change. If a team were to have multiple 100-100 players--as the Sixers did with Jones and Julius Erving--they could change the entire complexion of a defensive possession. By inverting the usual relationship between offense and defense, they could have their opponents on the defensive even as they supposedly played offense.
