Knightro wrote:OrlChamps2030 wrote:Brunson was a terrible defender by EPM metrics. Now he’s average. I wonder what Simons would look like on an elite defensive team
Couple things...
At his worst, Brunson was never as bad defensively as Simons currently is.
Brunson has consistently been in the 250-300 range defensively according to EPM. Simons has been in the 450-500+ range.
Also Brunson in NY has been basically the exact same defensively, at least according to EPM, as he was in Dallas.
I stand corrected then. I don’t have access to prior year EPM and I was going off of tweets (maybe from mid season from previous years) so my bad about that. How do you pull prior year EPM?
You did say above though that Simons had a defensive EPM ranking of 351 last season - by far his best defensive season then.
Last season, Simons:
- Started the most games of his career
- Played the most minutes of his career
- Played on the most competitive team he’s been on as a starter
- Started next to Josh Hart and Nurkic
Although it’s not great he trended down defensively this season, maybe he could get back to the 300-350 range on this team?
I’d feel pretty confident in betting that any guard that starts on this team next to Suggs won’t grade out as a league worst defender
Of course, how much I actually want Simons on this team is completely relative to how much it would take to get him and I don’t think it would take much to get him