NBA: Theme week, Defense: Draymond also does sexy things

As part of the NBA’s Analytics theme week, SPOX looks at the Advanced Stats in the Defense area today – and explains where the problems lie with the numbers available so far.

Defense wins championships.There is hardly a phrase in the mythology of basketball that is used more often and which is still universally accepted – although neither the Cavaliers nor the Warriors were able to stop the opponent regularly in the past finals.Nevertheless, the Dubs won the title because they were able to generate enough stops in the decisive moments.

However, the Defense is the aspect of the game that is probably the hardest to explore statistically.Especially since the “classic” numbers such as Steals and Blocks do not say much – a circumstance that Hall of Famer Isiah Thomas explained in the SPOX interview in January.

“In defense, people all too often look at how many steals or blocks someone had.Many players speculate on steals, leaving their husbands open to the game.At the end of the game, they stole 2 or 3 balls, but their opponent scored 30 points.Is that supposed to be good?”

Of course, it’s not – and that’s why the absolute defensive figures are even more cautious than the offensive ones.Hassan Whiteside, for example, is a block machine, but in the past this was often due to the fact that he only speculated on it and thus forgot his own opponent.

For this reason, the analytics community has long been trying to capture defense with metrics that go beyond blocks, steals, and rebounds.Although these are of course not completely unimportant – more important than the “x per game” for the consideration should be the respective rate that a player reaches.

For example, the defensive rebound rate (DRB%): This formula calculates the percentage of available rebounds that a given player grabs while standing on the court.Last season, Andre Drummond (36.2 percent) led the league here, finishing fourth in All-Time (behind Reggie Evans and twice Dennis Rodman).

The fact that Russell Westbrook (28.8 percent) also made it into last season’s top ten reveals a difficulty in the statistics: of course, the MVP is a great rebounder for his size, but his larger team-mates deliberately left him with many rebounds on his triple-double hunt.This is shown by the statistic “Uncontested Defensive Rebounds” (UDR): Russ was the clear leader last season with 7.8.He bagged almost 87 percent of his rebounds without “resistance”, far more than the other “top 10 rebounders” of the league.

Players with at least 1400 minutes played

Players with at least 5 defensive rebounds per game

The pure “per-game”statistics do not tell us everything about shot-blocking either.For a large part of the defensive impact does not come through the block itself, but through psychology:”It is not about blocking every throw.It’s about making your opponent believe that you may be blocking every roll,”said Bill Russell, who unfortunately hadn’t been captured at the time.Otherwise he would probably hold most records.

Blocks can be captured a little more precisely by the Block Percentage (BLK%).The formula is used to calculate how many percent of the opponent’s two-point throws are blocked by a given player as long as that player is on the court.Last season the “Stifle Tower” Rudy Gobert led this category with 6.4 percent, Manute Bol holds the all-time best value with 10.8 percent.

The Steal Percentage is also a metric for the Steals, which calculates the share of the opponent’s ball possessions that end with a Steal of a certain player as long as he is on the court.So it takes the game speed into account and is therefore more meaningful than the pure number of steals – but for the reason outlined by Thomas, it should not be used individually to describe a player as a “good defender”.

Page 1: Away from the absolute figures

Page 2: Draymond also makes Sexy Sche*

Page 3: One value for everything?