Ryno on defense is pretty simple: He knows his reaction time and his feet are slow. So he tries to compensate with focus and effort. He'll never have the defensive talent of quicker guys, but (and basically because of that) he'll often outwork them. The downside of this combination is that he has no deterrent power. Attackers will try moves on him that they wouldn't try on, say, Tucker or Ariza. But the upside is that attackers will often underestimate him, and end up blowing a shot because they were counting on an open look and are surprised to find a hand in their face.
Or maybe its the Andrea Bargnani Effect, they know Anderson is a white unathletic dude who is averse to contact so they try do moves they shouldn't be doing. Its not that Anderson is keeping up with all the opponents he faces its that the opponents become to aggressive and end up taking wild shots cuz they think it will go in because Anderson is guarding them.
I might be wrong but same effect seems to happen every time Zhou Qi’s on the court, which to me, is fun to watch.
Wasn't this also the case for some 3 point shooter some years ago? Was it Korver? Maybe Jason Kapono. Guys got greedy when they saw he was guarding them, so they'd play outside their normal game and would become more inefficient than usual.
I must say he is playing up to if no better than contract. He is better than most and i am glad to see him in Rocket red this year vs other players mentioned in the offseason. The no trade was the best trade so far. I am enjoying being wrong and hope to stay wrong about the over paid Anderson contract being just dead cap space. He did hustle last year but it didn’t matter his efforts are paying off this year though. RA please keep making a fool of me.
Ryan is playing the exact same solid defense that we said DMo did. He's just not as tall. He's rebounding as well as DMo, too. I'm firmly in Zach Lowe's corner on this ... he continues to play bizarrely solid defense. I'd also like to say that Zach Lowe continues to provide bizarrely solid rockets coverage, as well.
Pretty unbelievable, and I never thought I’d say this, but Ryan Anderson has been playing really good defense.
He did get more lean over the off-season. Definitely helped with his conditioning and agility to keep up with more athletic bigs.
This has been Ryno's best defensive season in years. Not particularly impressive, but he's hovering around average to mediocre. Hardly the time to pile on the guy for bad defense. He's been OK.
Morey has to have a stat for this already... You basically track opponents' number of "bad shots" when guarded by a player and combine it with their average on those shots. If they take more bad shots and their average on those shots stays the same or decreases then you have some kind of deceptive defense metric and/or bad defensive rep quotient. I really hope that's a thing that I just am ignorant about.
