But even accounting for that, it’s clear that some players are much more impactful defenders than others. Some of this has to do with Westbrook’s and Gobert’s respective positions - centers naturally defend more shots than guards do, a factor that DRAYMOND corrects for (see below). By contrast, Oklahoma City’s Russell Westbrook - whom DRAYMOND regards as being vastly overrated by other defensive metrics - was the nearest defender on only 12 shots per 100 possessions. Rather, it was that he was the nearest defender on so many shots: about 26 shots per 100 possessions that he was on the floor last year 1 as compared with a league average of about 17 shots defended per 100 possessions. So when I cited Gobert’s numbers earlier in this article, for instance, the most impressive part was not that opponents shot poorly against him, although that helped the Jazz, of course. So our new rating is called DRAYMOND, which stands for…. Just as CARMELO is a goofy backronym (Career-Arc Regression Model Estimator with Local Optimization) that honors one of our favorite players, Carmelo Anthony, we decided to give our new defensive rating a player-centric name, this time in honor of the Golden State Warriors’ Draymond Green, who has long been one of the best players in basketball by opponent shooting. So this year, we decided to evaluate the opponents’ shooting data in a more comprehensive way and incorporate it into our projection system, CARMELO. On the other hand, Toronto’s Serge Ibaka was an excellent defender based on opponents’ shooting, whereas RPM regards him as just average. But his opponents’ shooting data suggests he’s a big liability instead. Boston’s Kyrie Irving was regarded as a slightly above-average defender by RPM last year, for instance. We’ve been obsessed with this opponents’ shooting data for a while, in part because it sometimes seemed to track closely with players who had stronger or weaker defensive reputations than you would infer from other advanced statistics such as Real Plus-Minus. Opponents made only 45 percent of those field goal attempts, well below the roughly 49 percent that Second Spectrum estimates “should” have gone in against average defense for a given distance to the basket. Last regular season, for example, NBA Defensive Player of the Year Rudy Gobert defended a league-high 1,426 shots, according to motion tracking data by Second Spectrum, which identifies the nearest defender on every field goal attempt. That is, until a few years ago, when the NBA started publishing data on opponents’ shooting. If an opponent gets hot against your team and shoots 53 for 91 en route to scoring 130 points, we know your team defended poorly in the aggregate, but we don’t know which players to blame. But there’s no direct measure of shooting defense (other than blocks, which account for a relatively small fraction of missed shots). There are individual defensive statistics such as rebounds and steals, of course. But if no one kept track of who was taking shots and making buckets, we’d have, at best, an extremely fuzzy impression of which players were actually any good, even if we had access to all their other statistics.īut believe it or not, this had long been the situation when it came to measuring player defense. Shooting isn’t the only important action that takes place on a basketball court, obviously. Joe Ingles, who was the first Jazz player to test positive this season, returned from the Covid list on Monday.Basketball, in some sense, is fundamentally a shooting game. The Jazz still have four players in the NBA health and safety protocols in Hassan Whiteside, Udoka Azubuike, Elijah Hughes and Jared Butler. “But we have a great core of guys and as soon as we get them back, we’ll be right back on track.” “This is a unique NBA we play in,” Gay said. Gay, who was placed in Covid protocols on Sunday, is averaging 9.2 points and 4.6 rebounds. “We know we’re not just going to flip the switch, all of a sudden communicate, all of a sudden be able to stay in front of your man, and all of a sudden be able to rebound.” “Communication, not just one game or big game, it’s not talking,” Gobert said. He says the Jazz biggest problem right now is lack of communication on defense. Gobert is averaging 15.5 points, 15.1 rebounds and 2.3 blocks per game this season. Right now we are not at a championship level, and sometimes you need a tough stretch to remind you that.” “But sometimes I feel when you go through tough stretches as a team, it can make you better. “It’s never easy to watch your team lose games,” Gobert said.
The team’s defensive rating without Gobert has ballooned to 120.8. Gobert has missed the last five games, and the Jazz have gone 1-4 without the 3-time NBA Defensive Player of the Year. Shorthanded Jazz drop fourth straight game, 111-91