Recruiting defense

You hardly ever hear of a player being recruited because he is a great defensive player, and I think there is a logical reason for that. In the first place, players in high school who are good enough to go to D-1 schools are usually vastly better than their peers, and so they don’t have to work hard at defense, and really have little motivation to do so. In the second place, the defensive schemes in college are much more complex, and so there is little to which high school defensive abilities can be compared. So, college coaches recruit either for offensive skills or innate basketball instincts or athletic ability, and teach their defensive schemes and philosophy to the player in college. There are exceptions, of course, but that would be by far the rule, I’m thinking. Also, great defensive TEAMS are not just, or even necessarily, great individual defensive players, but they know how to make their team defense work and each person buys into the philosophy and does his part. The sum of the parts is greater than the whole, so to speak. That is one reason that really great defensive teams often come (these days) from lower-level schools where players are not leaving for the NBA, and where you see a lot of fifth-year seniors.