He needs to keep his turnovers in check. They're mostly the result of bad decision making. If the TO stat included bad judgement it'd be higher. He's been myopic a few times lately and missing the open man. I hope it's not the minutes played creeping up and getting him.
While I agree with this somewhat, I think there is more to it than that. In last night's game against SA, Lowry was yelling at the bench/staff which would lead me to believe that it had something to do with the defensive game plan at that point more so than Lowry getting burned. Not sure if he was expecting help but that completely changed my perception of what was happening.
You can't fault Lowry's defense against Tony Parker too much last night. High pick and roll defense is tricky (no wonder it's the most used play in basketball today) and actually puts more of the onus on the big who is coming up to defend. So it should be no surprise that when Scola or Patterson is being drawn up to the top of the key to help on the pick and roll, Lowry starts looking real bad real quick. Scola used to be good at hedging extremely hard (ask Derek Fisher) but that has all but disappeared this year. Patterson does not exert the effort (whether due to his injury or lack of lateral quickness in general, I don't know) either. Both of these PFs are leaving Lowry out to dry. I saw Dalembert hedge pretty hard once last night, but usually he waits beneath the pick looking for the block (he frequently leaves the midrange jumpshot available). All of this is to say you can't say Lowry is getting burned by quicker PGs (Wall, Parker) when so much of the problem is the other team members. *However, I do agree that his extra offensive load, compressed season, and total minutes played have seemed to hurt his energy levels on defense this year.
"I know the evidence says otherwise, and I have no basis for my opinion but Lowry's defense has slipped considerably." - DD
Durvasa, as always great post, but from what I see, he's not nearly as good on the ball and on pnr. I'm not saying overral he's a poor defender, but his competitive spirit keeps him average now. Anytime he plays against a quality pg, he can't keep him out the paint which collapses the defense inside out. Now he doesn't open the gate like nash and roll out the red carpet, but his resistence on such players ain't what it used to be. In all firness, his offense or command is good enough to the point of being a equal tradeoff. That's not a bad thing, just a thing. Lowry and his defense are last on the list in terms of rocket problems. His defense won't be the reason they don't make the playoffs or go out in the 1st rd. I just see what I see and take notes of what I see. Martin and scolas defense is a huge problem though.
Do you think that perhaps with a shot-blocking threat behind him, he is perhaps playing closer to his man on the perimeter which allows more penetration? In contrast, in the prior two seasons there wasn't that same help so the focus was more on containing the penetration. Just a theory.
I think its more of playing a lot and controlling the offense vs coming off the bench as a spark plug. It takes a gifted player to be really good on offense and defense. Actually, knowing you have a shotblocker allows u to square a guy a push him where u want to go. Last year minus dally, lowry was "sticking" to screens and trailing a lot. As I said, having scola as a 4 defensively hurt like hell. If teams want a basket, put scola in pnr.
Right. That's why I'm wondering if its the case that Lowry is just letting his guy go by him because he's getting beat like you're saying, or if he's purposely funneling his man towards the shot-blocker on some these plays. And, it would make sense that he's playing more tired because of his extra burdens on offense. However, I don't know if lack of energy is the realy explanation. I would expect a tired player to make less hustle plays in general, but Lowry's steals and defensive rebounding are way up.
Steals and rebounds are things players like to attempt to do. Fighting thru screens and contesting a shot are different. Players pick and choose
At this point, it seems almost impossible to overstate Lowry's excellence. McHale has trouble finding time to get him any rest w/o the Rox imploding on both ends. The team is clearly riding him to relevance so far. All of the individualized stats should be able to bring us to one consensus: Lowry is an elite team defender. I would argue that the NBA's modern handchecking rules contribute to making isolation defense far less important. Nobody is staying in front of Tony Parker on an island. Lowry seems quite adept at understanding where his help is, and funneling his man in that direction. Also, thanks for the remarkable post durvasa. It is nice to read a post and feel more informed when I finish. This reads like an audition to work in a front office somewhere, while DD seems to be looking to take over for Skip Bayless on 1st and 10.
I think that is a fair assessment. His on-ball has been overwhelmingly average this season. I expect him to turn it on around playoff time. His minutes and this schedule are both ridiculous...
Wow great post durvasa! Shows how much of a bulldog Lowry is. All this talk bout deron will is unnecessary unless of course he could bring in dwight
I agree with Leeb and Dakota on this one. I do give credit to the OP for the thread and all the work he put into the post but i think sometimes we make things too complicated. It's fairly clear to anyone who knows basketball that Lowry's defense has declined this season relative to other years. Sometimes stats are misleading especially when talking about a subject like defense in which there are no true stats that can measure quality defense. Still, he is by far our best player and I hope he continues to improve.
How is it clear? I don't understand what you are seeing, exactly. To me it seems that our big men aren't playing defense correctly behind him.
That's fine. I was interested to see if the stats reflected a slippage on the defensive end that some posters have described. Because there is no one good stat for defense, I looked at a variety of them that cover how the team performs with the player on the floor, what the player is doing according to the boxscore, and how effective the player was on guarding against an offensive threat. By all these measures , Lowry does pretty well this year (at least relative to the other PGs I compared him to). I agree with your point that stats can sometimes be misleading. However, if a player rates strongly by three different categories of statistics, then I think its more likely that he's doing a good job than a poor job on the whole.
You can be doing an average to poor job on defense and still rate highly in the advanced statistics which rely heavily on offensively oriented statistics. DD
