For me he’s better than decent, he’s very good but not world class. I think classing Wes brown as tremendous is very kind to say the least. Yes injuries affected him but surely we’ve got to look at the player he was and not what he could’ve been? He had a very good 07/08 at right back, but fabien Delph had a very good 17/18 at left back for city, we’ve seen time and time again a top team can elevate a player.
With regards to the ps, it was irrelevant at my time of posting as it seemed you were using him as a comparison. If you think Wes brown and Johnson were tremendous defenders, why are you using them as a yardstick to prove how average Maguire is?
Johnsen was a top top defender. Stam stole the shine because he was a freak of nature but Johnsen was top quality as well. It's a shame that injury crippled his career with us. Wes was top quality as well. He was pacey, he had technique, he had heart, he wasn't that great in aerial dominance which, I think, was further highlighted by Silvestre's lack of positioning and total uselessness in air dominance. I remember his debut against Leeds at age 17. He humiliated Jimmy Floyd so much that the Dutch striker had no choice but to kick the hell out of him and see red. Wes when in form was at the cusp of WC. Its a shame he was rarely at top condition and when he was, he was played either alongside a dinosaur (Blanc) or a fullback whom, for some strange reason, everyone thought that he was a CB as well.
However as you said, you have to see them throughout their entire career and in that case they have to be labelled as excellent defender but not WC players. Maguire is similar to that if not worse. His strengths are that he's tough as nails. You hit the guy and you'll think you hit a train. Apart from that, everything about him stinks of meah. He's decent in air but he's not as good as Smalling is let alone a Bruce. His distribution of the ball is decent but he's not a Pique let alone a Rio, he's painfully slow, I mean, I can't believe that in modern football a CB whose so slow can survive at top clubs level. We're talking of old Baresi/Bruce speed here. His position is meah, his leadership is meah and his football brain is meah. Which makes me wonder, is he really an 80m CB? I dare to say that if lets say he was a Portuguese/Brazilian/Italian CB playing in the Portuguese/Brazilian/Italian league then he would be 35m-40m tops. The stats doesn't help either. Apart from last season were Leicester had the 7th best defence in the EPL, Maguire was part of two of the worst defenses in the EPL. Leicester were 16th place in terms of goals conceded in 2017-18 and Hull had the worst defence in the EPL the year before. But that's not all. This year, Leicester has conceded less goals then we did and that despite we took their 'best CB'. They are also in 3rd place while we're 5th, 14 points away from them. There's something really wrong when a rival team ends up way better then you despite you having bought their best CB on a record signing fee.
And for the record, I think Rio was the best CB of his generation + England's defence made up of Gaz-Rio-Terry-Cole was the best defence of its generation as well.