You cannot pay a rim protector for the shots nobody took

Deterrence is the largest part of interior defence and the only part that leaves no trace in a box score.

A guard beats his man off the dribble, gets two steps into the paint, sees a large person waiting, and pulls the ball back out. Nothing happened. No block, no rebound, no foul, no entry in any column. That non-event is most of what a great interior defender does for a living.

Blocks are a terrible proxy for it, and the reason is almost comic. To record a block you have to permit the shot. The most effective deterrent in the league discourages the attempt entirely and therefore blocks fewer shots than a lesser player who leaves his feet at everything. So a statistic that everyone knows is flawed keeps being cited, because the alternative requires tracking data and a definition of a deterred drive that nobody agrees on.

Opponent field goal percentage at the rim is better, and still incomplete, since it only counts the shots that survived the decision to take them. The genuinely useful version is a rate: how often opponents attempt anything within a few feet of the basket while this man is on the floor. That number moves substantially with a real anchor, and it captures the retreat as well as the rejection.

Here is where it becomes a money problem. A team knows in its bones that the defence collapses when the big sits. The public sees a player with modest counting numbers who cannot shoot, gets switched onto guards and looks lost, and concludes the contract is bad. Front offices are not immune to that noise, particularly when a season has gone poorly and someone has to be blamed.

So these players are systematically underpaid relative to their effect, until a team loses one and spends the following year watching layups.

The counter-argument is real and I will grant it. Deterrence is easier to attack in a playoff series, where a good offence hunts the drop coverage with a shooting big and turns the deterrent into a spectator. Fine. That is an argument about a specific matchup lasting seven games.

It is not an argument for pretending the other seventy-five nights never happened.