While we have substantial trouble measuring defensive prowess and impact, one of the things that we do know is that the truly elite defensive players generally age better than the general NBA player in terms of production.

Though there are different ways that experts and non-experts alike have tried to quantify and explain defensive impact, my personal favorite is Defensive Win Shares. Using Dean Oliver’s Defensive Rating as a base, it utilizes both how a player does on the court and how the team does when he is and is not on the court along with what we know in the modern NBA thanks to tracking things like steals and blocks while relying more heavily on what information we have for the previous generations of players. While I prefer WS/48 (which scales for minutes played) as a way of determining player quality, Defensive Win Shares provides insight here as it aggregates over the course of a season, leaving an estimate for how much total impact a given player had on that side of the ball.

Dwight Howard has played nine seasons in the NBA. Excluding his rookie year and the 11-12 season (lockout shortened, plus Howard was injured), we are left with seven seasons to work from. Picking the middle season of these seven in Defensive Win Shares gives us Howard's 2007-08 year. His 6.4 DWS is meaningfully lower than his top three seasons but still quite strong. In fact, it would have beaten Paul George for the No. 1 spot this season by just 0.1.

By using that as a baseline, we can look at what players in the NBA’s history have generated that kind of difference on the defensive end and gain some insight based on how their futures went. In total there are 99 individual seasons (by 36 total players) where someone earned 6.4 or more Win Shares. While most of these players are big men by the definition of their day, the list stays most interesting for players who repeated this feat at least once. As you can see on the link above, that narrower list has 17 names on it. As of today, only five of those 17 are not enshrined in the Hall of Fame: Dikembe Mutombo (not eligible yet), Ben Wallace (not eligible yet), Dave Cowens, Tim Duncan and Dwight Howard. Quite good company to be in since only Dave Cowens did not play a meaningful role in the league into his mid-thirties.

On top of that, only 11 players ever posted four or more seasons of this caliber on the defensive end and most of them only need one name to be recognized: Hakeem, Mikan, Elvin Hayes, Dwight, Kareem, Patrick, Big Ben, Tim Duncan, David Robinson, Wilt and Russell. Not bad.

What makes this overall collection of talent even more remarkable is when in their careers they made that kind of difference on the defensive end. Of those 99 seasons, 69 happened when the player was in their twenties and only 27 occurred at age 25 or younger.

Here is the full list of those individuals:

LeBron James, Vern Mikkelsen (HOF), Karl Malone (HOF),  Walt Frazier (HOF), Maurice Stokes (HOF), Wes Unseld (HOF), Bob Lanier (HOF),  Elvin Hayes (HOF), David Robinson (2x-HOF), Wilt Chamberlain (2x-HOF), Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (2x- HOF), Bill Russell (3x-HOF), Dave Cowens (3x-HOF), Tim Duncan (3x), and Dwight Howard (4x)

That’s it. Even the players on that list who did not age particularly well as defensive players still had major impacts deep into their thirties because the amount of people on this Earth who can do what they accomplished at a young age is very, very small. Being able to join that company early in a career indicates something special relative to their peers and that advantage does not recede in the same way so many other parts of the game do.

Pundits like Bill Simmons can look at a year Howard was hurt and a year where he played in a system that minimized his strengths and magnified his weaknesses and write him off using pithy garbage like personality, but I will take production and talent over conjecture and narrative any day of the week and if history is any guide my odds look pretty good.