NBA 75: A history lesson on defense and ranking the 25 best defenders of all time

Welcome to the NBA 75, The Athletic’s countdown of the 75 best players in NBA history, in honor of the league’s diamond anniversary. We also will run features such as this one to complement certain players and moments throughout our series. How do you measure the absence of something? That, at heart, is the problem with evaluating defense in virtually any sport. While we can tell relatively quickly what happened at the team level — the other team didn’t score — assigning individual credit for those instances…