DimesandKnicks wrote:This metric has Isiah Hartenstien at 7. I’m not sure that metric means he’s the 7th most impactful defender but having watched pretty much every Knick game, while Hartenstien is a solid to good defender, I wouldn’t say he’s risen to the level of great. Not more impactful than a Draymond Green, AD, or Bam.
Sabonis is ranked significantly higher than Jaren Jackson and Horford and has Jokic right after Horford. A player who gets criticized for his defense doesn’t belong next to a player who’s praised for his defense.
This google sheet has Jokic and James at similiar tier’s defensively and both are graded above Jordan. It also only grades Hakeem, who the DPOY is named after as slightly better than Jokic.
Jokic also has an identical rating to Jason Kidd who’s one of the greatest defensive guards of all time. It also puts Jokic in a similiar tier to Dwight Howard and above Joakim Noah
Gary Payton ranks tiers below all the afore mentioned.
The actual game play doesn’t validate a lot of these findings and I wouldn’t use it as a metric to measure a players defensive impact considering it’s many abnormalities.
According to:
https://www.statmuse.com/nba/ask/who-leads-the-league-in-drpm-this-seasonBradley Beal is the fourth most impactful defender and Harrison Barnes is second while Gobert and Green don’t make the top 20. These advance metrics are incredibly flawed.
Okay, so a few foundational problems with what you’re trying to argue here:
1. These measures are either RAPM or based on RAPM with a box prior. RAPM is quite noisy over single-season samples. Adding a prior makes it less noisy in small samples, but it is still inherently noisy, primarily because the sample of data when people are on or off the court isn’t high in small samples. So yes, with noisy data, you get some weird results (though, the results also do *mostly* look right even in such small samples, and I don’t see you denying that). Some of those results you think are weird might actually be because you are wrong in your individual assessment of players, but a lot of the time you’re just going to be pointing to the result of RAPM being noisy in small samples. The problem you have here is that RAPM gets a lot less noisy over larger samples, and I didn’t just give you a single season of Jokic’s and LeBron’s data. I gave you analysis across a bunch of seasons in a bunch of different metrics. So yes, one can always point to weird results in single-season impact data, caused by statistical noise. But the chances of the results just being caused by statistical noise when we are looking at data across a bunch of seasons (and a bunch of different metrics) is way lower, and pointing to idiosyncratic single-season results doesn’t change that.
2. You do try to claim that career DRAPM must be wrong, based on things you assert are “abnormalities” but you seem to not understand what the time horizon is on that career DRAPM data. Specifically, it starts at the advent of play-by-play data in 1996-1997. So yeah, Hakeem only looking slightly better than Jokic in defense is really not particularly abnormal at all, because the data is only encompassing Hakeem’s age 34-39 seasons—which are miles away from his defensive peak. Same thing with Jordan, whose seasons in that data set are just him at ages 33, 34, 38, and 39. The data on Gary Payton doesn’t include his DPOY year, and almost half of it is from years where he was old and not making all-defensive teams anymore. The career RAPM data isn’t looking at the whole career for older guys like this, so you shouldn’t draw opinions about the data based on a feeling of how those players should rate based on their whole career.
3. Meanwhile, you mention Dwight Howard—who does have complete data for his career included. But the thing is that we also know his year-to-year DRAPM (as calculated by the same guy who did the career RAPM calculations I linked to) was very high—typically in the 3.0-4.5 range—during the years he was being recognized as a great defender. The rest of his career—which includes a lot of years where he was nowhere near as good of a defender as before—obviously weigh him down, such that the overall career DRAPM isn’t much higher than Jokic. But DRAPM actually does indicate that peak Howard was a significantly better defender than Jokic, which actually is suggestive of DRAPM being accurate to your expectations, not inaccurate.
4. You asked statsmuse who leads in DRPM this season, but RPM does not exist for this season, so the Statsmuse output is just completely false. It appears to literally just be a listing of players in alphabetical order!
So yeah, there’s really not a lot to your criticisms, once we recognize that single-season impact data is very noisy (and that I’d provided less noisy multi-year data validating my point), that career DRAPM data only starts at 1996-1997, that you partially relied on completely false information, etc.
As for how exactly they’re calculated, that’s incredibly complicated and not something you could in any way do by hand. I’ve given you the basic overview of what it is in multiple posts already (as have other people). Each individual measure I listed does things a little differently, and there’s not complete transparency about exactly what they do because, again, it is extremely complicated. But you can easily look up how RAPM is calculated, and for LEBRON and RPM, it is basically just RAPM with a box-score prior. If you want to know the exact details of all the calculations and the data sets and precise regression methodology used, then you’d have to get in touch with the creators of each measure.
Using a metric that’s to complicated to understand that’s has abnormalities in it to measure the impact of a players defense is strange to me. I read somewhere that they recalculated an advance stat after Westbrook blew past records after his triple double seasons. You’re relying on seemingly arbitrary formulas, that aren’t transparent, from people whose names we don’t know to support an argument about the defensive impact of a C who admitted himself he wasn’t a good a defender. If these random people can upheave an advance metric because a single player invalidates it (Westbrook) how reliable are they?
Whats baked into them? How much does Jokic having bad subs throughout his career play? How much does his impact offensively, allowing his teams defense to get set and not deal with transition offense, coupled with his rebounding and deflections contribute to his these metrics not passing the smell test?
It’s not “too complicated to understand.” It just involves running regressions on absolutely enormous data sets, so is not something someone can just set forth to you on an Internet forum. RAPM is inherently not an “arbitrary formula,” since it just regressing on-off data. Even the box/tracking priors used are not “arbitrary” at all, since the weighting is based on weightings that closely approximate large-sample RAPM. And, no impact data was “recalculated” because of Russell Westbrook. Impact data and all-in-one box stats are not at all the same thing, and I am talking about impact data, so that Westbrook thing is a complete straw man.
As for your other questions, let’s take them one by one:
1. How much does Jokic having bad subs throughout his career play? Well, this is where RAPM is great, because RAPM adjusts for how good or bad the players are who are playing on and off the court with him. Which means that if a player has a sub who is bad defensively, that fact won’t help him, since the model will adjust for that sub being bad defensively.
2. How much does his rebounding and deflections contribute to his defensive impact data looking good? Probably quite a lot! As it naturally would, since those are very important things that genuinely have a massive effect on how much opposing teams score. Like, sure, if you want to define everything Jokic does really well defensively as not being part of defense, then you can get yourself to a conclusion that he’s not a good defender. But that’s just obviously ridiculous. Jokic is an *incredibly* impactful defensive rebounder, and that’s a huge part of why he’s a good defender. And you seem to not be understanding that if defensive rebounding is helping Jokic in this data, it’s because his rebounding leads to opponents scoring less, not because the data is arbitrarily weighing defensive rebounds highly. Impact data is not grounded in weighing box stats. It is grounded in isolating out an individual player’s effect on plus-minus data, regardless of any particular box data stats. That’s what makes it so good for measuring defense—which is an area where box stats don’t encompass much!
3. As for how much his offensive impact drives his defensive impact, there’s an argument that that might be the case to some degree. I’m not sure it’s really true, because, while being better offensively limits the transition opportunities the other team has, being better offensively *also* makes your team more likely to be ahead by a lot instead of behind by a lot, and teams defend a lot worse when they’re ahead by a lot. Either way, though, it’s not really relevant to this comparison, because we are comparing to LeBron, and LeBron has elite offensive impact too, so this same factor would be helping LeBron a similar amount. It cannot be some major factor allowing Jokic to look similarly good to LeBron defensively while actually not being as good—rather, it’d just be a potential factor that would make them *both* look better defensively than they should.
The bottom line is that, for measuring defense, impact measures like these are the best measures we have. And they support my point, not yours.
These is your opinion and I disagree with you. I think if anything it would support an argument that defensive advanced analytics are ****. It really seems like his offensive impact in thwarting transition offense and his rebounding has a great impact on his unusual hierarchy in his defensive advance stats. I also read somewhere that assist have some impact on defense advance metrics. I’ve never really seen people champion a players defense in the abstract. Jokic really seems to be the NBA darling in that you have people defending his defense abstractly as opposed to recognizing his flaws defensively and ranking him as the average defensive player he is. It’s odd the lack of criticism he gets in comparison to other greats.
Please go on and tell me what measure of defense is better than impact measures? They’re just clearly the best, since everything else is hopelessly simplistic in measuring defense. Again, please understand that “advanced” box stats (like PER, win shares, etc.) are not the same as impact data. Impact data is not weighing assists or rebounds or other box stats to spit out a number. It is isolating out the effect of an individual player on what happens to the scoreline. That’s obviously the best way to look at defense, and it is a method that completely backs what I have been asserting and contradicts your position entirely.
If “no one was elite” but the entire defense as a whole was elite (which it undeniably was), then what’s your point? They had an elite defense. And that elite defense is what carried them. Whether they were elite because they had elite individual defenders or they were elite because they played incredibly well together as a defensive unit (or, more likely, a combination of the two) is largely beside the point. The fact is that LeBron’s supporting cast played amazing defense, and it was the team’s defense that carried them.
If you put Dwight Howard on that team, then you’re probably right, since Dwight Howard wasn’t a very good offensive player, and they didn’t need Dwight Howard to have a historically good defense. I don’t think Dwight Howard would have much marginal value on that team. The bottom line is that LeBron carried the offensive load for a team that was very limited offensively, and the result was that they were…not a good offensive team at all (and genuinely bad offensively in the playoffs). Without LeBron, they’d certainly have been even worse offensively, but I think it’s certainly reasonable to think that there are plenty of other players who could’ve been put in LeBron’s place and elevated that team’s offense to be similarly bad offensively. This isn’t a very high bar! And, in terms of making the Finals, we should note that the Cavs weren’t taken to 7 games in any of those series, so there was actually even some room for someone to elevate the offense even less than LeBron did and still make the Finals (which, again, is a reflection of how historically good the defense was). Honestly, I think there’s essentially zero argument whatsoever that LeBron carried that team. It’s just completely clear that their defense carried them. If you don’t want to give credit to the players that actually played such great defense, then perhaps you should just conclude that Mike Brown hard carried that team.
This is just a really weird take and I don’t know why you’re of the opinion that Lebron wasn’t the driving force behind that teams success. They literally made it to the conference finals and took the Pistons, who lost to the Spurs the year prior, to seven games with pretty much the same exact team. That team also had an identical record to the team in question but had a middle of the pack defense. What carried them to the conference finals that year?
It’s not a really weird take at all. How did the 2007 Cavaliers beat the Pistons? It wasn’t their offense. In that series, the Cavaliers scored fewer points per 100 possessions than the 2007 Pistons averaged giving up during the regular season. In other words, in that series against the Pistons, the 2007 Cavaliers had a genuinely below average offense even compared to what the league did against those Pistons specifically. So how did they win? Well, they only gave up 99.8 points per 100 possessions to the Pistons—who were a team that averaged 108.9 points per 100 possessions in the regular season. The 2007 Cavaliers beat the Pistons by having a below average offense but a completely dominant defense. LeBron James carried the load for the 2007 Cavaliers offensively, but he was just another cog in the wheel for the defense. And the 2007 Cavaliers beat the Pistons by being subpar at the side of the ball LeBron carried the load on but being completely dominant on the side of the ball he was just a cog in. It is quite obvious that LeBron didn’t carry the team, but rather that the team’s defense did. Again, if you don’t want to give credit to the supporting cast for playing historically elite defense that carried LeBron and the Cavs to the Finals despite their inability to produce even average offense, then you should thank Mike Brown for his immense defensive coaching. The idea that LeBron carried a team that was so obviously carried by team defense in a year where LeBron was not a noted defender is just silly.
And, since this part of your post was not particularly clear, to the extent you’re referring to the 2006 series against the Pistons, please note that the Cavs offense was bad in that series too. It was the same story. In that 2006 series, the Cavs scored 99.4 points per 100 possessions against a team that had given up 103.1 points per 100 possessions in the regular season. In other words, the Cavs had a genuinely bad offense in that series. So how was the series close? Well, the Cavs gave up 106.4 points per 100 possessions to a team that scored 110.8 points per 100 possessions in the regular season. So, in that series, the Cavs had a bad offense and a good defense, and the result was that the series was close. And, by the way, to the extent you might point out that the Cavs got to 7 games despite actually being outscored a good bit and that that suggests doing well in business end of close wins, please note that LeBron had a putrid 45.6% TS% in the 4th quarters of the three games Cleveland won (along with 5 turnovers). The Cavs won those close games by giving up only 52 total points combined in the 4th quarters of the three games they won (17.3 points per quarter) and overall holding the Pistons to incredibly low 98.5, 86.1, and 99.8 points per 100 possessions in those games, while the Cavs offense averaged like 100.3 points per 100 possessions—again, bad offense carried by great team defense.
