lessthanjake wrote:If career DRAPM says someone was a bad defender, maybe they just were a bad defender on average over the course of their career, and your eye test is wrong? Did you think of that? Like, if over an huge sample size, they had a very negative impact on their teams’ defense, then it is very likely that they were, on average, a bad defender. And I gave you more data than just raw DRAPM anyways.
You didn’t offer a response when I highlighted some of the abnormalities comprised in the career DRAPM list you provided me with. But if you’d like to explain away some the examples below I’m all ears. Also, the creators of these metrics will tell you that these metrics exist to supplement the eye test and quantify the defensive impact of players who don’t incur a lot of box score defensive stats; not usurp it.
If you want to narrow on what it is about Tristian Thompson defensive impact that makes him the 121 worst defender in the NBA history since 1997, I’m all ears:
“DRAPM has Deshawn Stevenson as one of the top 50 worst defenders, below the likes of Enes Freedom, and Isaiah Thomas.
Isaiah Thomas is nine spots above Triston Thompson. Thompson is one of the better post defenders in the league in his prime. He's one of the few player who can defend the rim, defend the post, and switich on smaller/quicker players. This metric has him as a **** defender. Worse than Eddy Curry, Wally Szcerbiak, Melo, Al Jefferson.
Klay Thompson is worse than Mo Williams Evan Fournier and David Lee. Steve Nash is better than Kobe and shares the same number as Dwayne Wade.
Curry and Kemba are better defenders than John Wall.
Raefer Alston is better than Baron Davis and Trevor Ariza.
Kevin looney is worse than Donovan Mitchell, and Demarcous Cousins and Nikola Vucevic.
Shawn Marion, Brook Lopez, Kwahi, OG, Kirlenko, Smart and Horford are all worse than Jokic.
Camby is worse than Lamar Odom and Odom is up there with Tyson Chandler, Bam, and Metta World Peace
Marko Jaric is as good as KCP.
Alex Caruso beats out Draymond, Tim Duncan, and Ben Wallace”
Again; I’m all ears.
If you don’t understand that teams go at the other team’s best offensive player in order to tire them out and make them less effective on the other end, then you just have an overly simplistic view of basketball. But you asked for an example, so I’ll give you one: The Cavs always “hunted” Steph in those Finals against the Warriors, even though they literally shot worse when guarded by Steph than when guarded by anyone else on the entire Warriors team! See the spoiler text below for data on this from a prior post I’ve made in another thread. It wasn’t a strategy the Cavs did in order to maximize how many points they scored. It was a strategy the Cavs did in order to try to optimize how well they did *overall*. Basically, attacking Steph on offense was a way to help their defense by making Steph tired and therefore limiting how much he could do on offense.
I thought your example would be a “good defender”. That’s the example I’m looking for. An example of the opposing offense targeting a “good defender” to tire them out as opposed to targeting a “bad defender” so they can actually score on each possession. I also said sure, meaning that yea maybe they do but they also do so for the above reasons I highlighted.
Ultimately, basketball is a dynamic game, where what happens on offense and defense are not independent from each other. Teams very often make decisions to do things that are bad for one end of the floor because they think it’ll have an even larger benefit on the other end of the floor. And we don’t just see this with teams “hunting” the other team’s best offensive player. We see it with all kinds of other things. For instance, teams would optimize how much they score if they crashed the offensive glass a bunch, but they don’t do that much at all because crashing the offensive glass will hurt their defense by resulting in them giving up lots of transition baskets
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I’m simply being critical of Jokic’s “shot defense”. I don’t think that part of his game is good. I think it’s on the spectrum between bad and solid.
I use as an example the Cavaliers in those finals—which was a team that hunted Steph a lot. They hunted Steph, but the Cavs did not actually produce efficient offense by their standards in those finals. They usually dipped (as did the Rockets—who faced the Warriors multiple times in the playoffs and tried the same tactic and typically had catastrophic drops in offensive efficiency). And there’s reason to believe this was in part because of hunting Steph being very ineffective, not in spite of hunting Steph working. Specifically, we have data that shows us that actually, in those finals, the Cavs shot a worse FG% when defended by Steph than they did when defended by any other Warriors player that got meaningful minutes. Hunting Steph was not actually successful:
None of this makes Steph a “good defender”. It makes the Warriors a good defensive team that can compensate for his defensive short comings.
The NBA’s website actually has data on how teams shot when defended by specific players. See this link and you can filter down to the 2015-2016 playoffs for the Warriors specifically when facing the Cavaliers: https://www.nba.com/stats/players/defense-dash-overall?Season=2015-16. Overall, across all those finals against the Cavs, we can derive from that database that the Cavaliers shot just 36.0% from the field when defended by Steph. For reference, the corresponding number for Iguodala over those finals was 44.4%. The corresponding number for Klay over those finals was 43.1%. The number for Draymond in those finals was 41.7%. For Livingston, it was 39.2% overall. In the two finals Durant was in, the Cavs shot 48.7% when defended by Durant. In the two prior finals, the Cavs shot 46.4% when defended by Harrison Barnes, and 46.9% when defended by Leandro Barbosa. The Cavs shot a total of 39.1% when defended by Bogut in the finals Bogut played in. The Cavs objectively fared *particularly* badly in those finals when defended by Steph. Indeed, in those finals overall, the Cavs shot a worse FG% when defended by Steph than they did when defended by any other Warriors player that got meaningful minutes, and it’s not even close.[/spoiler]
Again none of this makes Steph a good defender. It makes the warriors and its scheme sufficient.
If a team plays elite defense (which they did), then they are not a “team of scrubs.” Defense is half the game. A supporting cast that is historically elite at half the game is simply not a supporting cast of “scrubs.” You seem to think that a supporting cast that is lacking in offensive firepower but plays fantastic defense are just “scrubs.” This is just not a correct opinion. They were a team that played absolutely elite defense and their limited offensive firepower was mitigated by the fact that they had a star player that prefers playing a heliocentric offensive style anyways. That’s a team that is good and is well-built to optimize around their star player.
I keep bringing up the 05-06 season to highlight that it’s not as if the 06-07 Cav’s were full of talented defensive players. They had a great team defensive in 06-07, but the actual talent on that roster were still bottom feeders relative to the rest of the eastern conference. Replace James with Paul Pierce, a top 75 NBA player of all time, and that team doesn’t make the finals or win 50 games. Replace Pierce with James on the Celtics and they make the playoffs.
Another thing I’d note is that this whole discussion about the 2007 Cavs basically involves you acting like you don’t care about defense when it comes to whether players are good or not. But then you are simultaneously downplaying Jokic solely on the basis of defense (which you also narrowly define to not include a lot of the things that Jokic is great at on defense). How is it the case that the 2007 Cavs supporting cast can be “scrubs” despite playing historically elite defense, while Jokic’s defense is something you find really important?
Again, my discussion isn’t about the 07 Cav’s. It’s about their players which also played in 06 and didn’t have a great all time defense and still winning the same amount of games in the regular season. This doesn’t position that roster as having a “solid”/ talented group of defenders
