Author Topic: List your Top 10 Defenders in the league and explain why you chose them.  (Read 5171 times)

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Offline greece66

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My 2 at each position.
PG-Wall, Smart
SG-AB, Butler
SF-Kawhi, LeBron
PF-Green, Davis
C-Jordan, Drummond

Forgot to add things I feel carry weight. Rebs, on ball defense, steals/deflections, drawing fouls O&D, quickness, play recognition/help D, and instinct are important to me. An occasional block is always great too.
Using your qualifications, can you demonstrate how Marcus Smart and Avery Bradley are top 2 for their positions? 

I'm seeing a lot of people listing their qualifications ("on ball defense" for instance), but they aren't showing how the player compares with the rest of the league.  Can you conclusively show how Avery Bradley is best on ball defender in the league?  Isn't there a stat for it?  Does he rank 1st in that stat? 

What I'm still seeing is just opinion-based.  Most of this is "eye test".  "I think this guy is the best, because I watch him and he looks like the best".  It's strange how massive the disparity is between our understanding of offensive excellence and defensive excellence.  I can sit here and tell you Steph Curry was the best offensive player in the league, because I look at things like scoring efficiency and total points... but then I can conclusively back that up by showing you how he ranks in things like TS%, eFG%, etc.

Nowhere in this entire two page thread has anyone backed up their list with actual evidence.  Pho listed some qualifications that seemingly we could actually look up and analyze. But I don't see a single stat in this thread so far.  That's really interesting to me.   The closest thing I've seen to a "stat" is someone listing off Rondo's Defensive awards.   So he was the best, because someone else said he's the best... and the stat to back that up is that someone said he was the best.

To be clear, I'm not trying to discredit anyone's list.  These might be totally on-point.  I'd just like to expand our defensive knowledge beyond word-of-mouth, the arbitrary "eye test", and general perception.

If Smart and Bradley are genuinely the two best at their positions, there most be some evidence to support that.  That's a pretty big deal if true.  Can anyone prove it?

I'm not a stats person, but here is my two cents.

Offence is easier to quantify than defence: in D you have too many intangibles + too much depends on who you play against. For instance, Iguodala got a lot of credit for stopping LBJ in but  his performance is impossible to pin down exclusively through statistical analysis- one literally needs to watch the series to appreciate his performance.

DRPM, DWS, STL%, TRB% etc are all good, but you still need the eye test to assess defensive performance. I would also add to this a good understanding of a team's defensive plan: stat padding can happen in D too.

ofc this leaves the window open for fanbases to be biased and for the media to rely on stereotypes. but I would make the case that this shows why we need more informed expert opinion for defensive performance; metrics are great for comparisons and to test one's opinion against hard facts, but they will never substitute the eye-test.

Offline greece66

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Add this to the above

Quote
Defense is only partially captured by the box score, so elite defenders based on position and communication, like Kevin Garnett and Tim Duncan, will not be properly represented. The regression mathematically accounts for that, pulling all of the estimates closer to average.

The source has interesting stuff on BPM in general, and DBPM in particular.

http://www.basketball-reference.com/about/bpm.html

Add to this that DBPM is rather bad not only at capturing the elite but also at distinguishing the really bad. Looking at this season's worst DBPM you will find  Klay Thompson (-2.2), Reggie Jackson (-1.6), Dellavedova (-1.4) and Mike Conley (-1.9).

http://bkref.com/tiny/9HW6k

Again, I think that when evaluating defence, the eye test remains the most important tool we have; there are certain dangers in this (fanbases getting impressed with highlights instead of proper defensive plays) but it's the best we' ve got anyway...


Offline Snakehead

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Guards

Paul, Rubio, Smart

Wings

Kawhi, George, Iguodala

Bigs

Draymond, Jordan, Millsap, Whiteside




Great list. I would say it's mine as well.  I think you could replace Rubio with someone (I might actually go Avery) and maybe have Gobert over Whiteside but those are all close.

I really think Smart is for sure that good and Avery close, which is why our perimeter defense was so good this year (with Crowder a big part as well).

I would not have had Millsap on that list before this series, but it made me realize how good he is on defense.  His help rotations are unbelievable.
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