(Obviously, this player could have provided additional value based on his defense against 3-point shots. … about 20 points from being scored with his defense. For example, if a player faced 100 2-point shots and allowed 46 of them to go in when you’d expect 56 percent of them to be converted if wide open, that player prevented … This allows us to calculate an initial score that we call RAW_DRAYMOND. For instance, if a certain type of above-the-break 3-pointer is made 34 percent of the time against average defense, we’d expect it to go in about 42 percent of the time if it was truly open.
Rudy gay defensive rating trial#
Through trial and error, we found that DRAYMOND performs best 3 if you assume that shooting percentages on open shots are about 8 percentage points higher than against average defense. Some defense is generally better than none if Player X hadn’t defended the shot, it’s possible that no one else would have. That is to say, we generally don’t want to punish a player for happening to be the nearest defender according to the Second Spectrum data. We’ll keep it pretty brief.Īs I mentioned above, what we’re really interested in is how much value a defender provides relative to an open shot. I’m sure you’re curious to see some data, but first, an explanation of how DRAYMOND is calculated. 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. Basketball, in some sense, is fundamentally a shooting game.