Individual +/- is not a reliable metric. It's just how many points per possession when the guy is on the floor and off the floor. The other 9 players on the floor with him and off the floor without him have a lot to do with that number. The most one can say for a player with high Def +/- is that he's not a total liability defensively that drags down the whole team's defense. Players like Jokic , Sengun, and Sheppard are perceived to be defensive liability that some people say "would be played off the court in the playoffs." Jokic definitely have not been played off the court. I don't think Reed will either.
It's still a bit early in the season, so anything can happen, but in the initial 14 games of the season, there's a pretty solid comparison.
Last night's second half is an interesting case point for Sheppard's ongoing development. He had that barrage in the first half, but second half it felt like he was more just a decoy and floor spacer. He also looked like he was gassed from the minutes, as evident by IIRC an airball 3 followed by missing 2 FTs late in the game. I don't mind it because I've always wanted Ime to play Reed more even if it leads to some regular season losses. But it will be interesting going forward how he meshes with the starters, and how he will handle bigger minutes night to night.
I've seen guys do that in my life, but typically it boils down to either your mechanics or routine/ritual (which helps concentration). Reed's mechanics are exceptional. I think he probably rushes himself and doesn't take that moment to gather himself to focus on the task at hand. A routine or ritual allows you to slow down your breathing, collect yourself and then shoot your shot. The other factor is he hasn't shot a lot of FTs in the NBA and he should get better, but hopefully he develops a routine that helps him relax before he shoots. When you watch KD he has a very specific and repeatable ritual, and his results speak for themselves.
Adding all levels of pro ball (including preseason and summer league) he's shot 77% from the line with extremely infrequent trips, less than one a game. He shot 83% at Kentucky, on basically 2 FT's per game. So roughly 80% between all levels, certainly not bad but also nowhere near as good as he should be. He did shoot 89% his junior and senior years of high school, so I would hope he can get back to that level if he starts getting to the line more regularly like he did then.
I will say raw +/- can be used in the extremes with a decent sample size. For the Rockets, Sengun, Durant, Amen, and Reed (not counting 1st 2 games) all look like good players such that it seems like Rockets almost always have 2 good players on the court causing few extremes.
That was certainly true of his FTs at the end of the Magic game. He went so fast that I assumed he was doing it to avoid getting nervous. But maybe as he matures he'll do it more like KD, with a motion he can get into before he releases the ball.
Not that this is any kind of grand revelation, but it's always nice to have numbers that line up with the eye test. Source: https://databallr.com/dashboard Reed's defensive playmaking numbers here are elite, and his shot contesting is actually pretty good in general (75th percentile). His obvious weakness is how often he ends up defending rim attempts (RIMDFGA) and how well players shoot on those attempts relative to league average (DIFF). This season, he's allowing +7.2% at the rim. Not good. However...his DIFF was actually really solid last year (-0.5%) on an even greater frequency of 10.2 rim attempts defended per 100 possessions (100th percentile). My first thought is that he had the element of surprise last year whereas teams are now deliberately hunting and switching for optimal mismatches. Could also be the increased use of zone putting him in more situations where he's forced to make desperate late rotations on bigs that end up counting as contests. If he can even just split the difference between this year and last and get his rim DIFF down to around +3%, that'll put him firmly middle of the pack among small guards. For reference, here's the previous 5 year average DIFF for some other small guards, sorted best to worst: VanVleet: -2.2% Quickley: -1.9% *Curry: -0.3% Kyrie: +0.6% Maxey: +1.4% Schroeder: +2.1% McConnell: +3.3% Garland: +3.5% Davion Mitchell: +4.9% Trae: +5.2% Alvarado: +5.2% Aaron Holiday: +5.4% Brunson: +5.5% I had to calculate these manually so I only chose a dozen or so. I don't know if FVV is actually the best rim defending small guard, but he did come out on top in this randomly selected group and is clearly very good. *You might be surprised to see Curry near the top of the list. While his DIFF values since 2020 have been quite good, he was an abysmal +8.5% on average from 2014 (first year measured) through 2019. Rest assured, young Steph was getting sufficiently toasted down low, but was good enough on the other end that it didn't matter.
Yup. Jokic - he's the baddest man on the planet in terms of defense, and, as you can see, it's not even close! Seriously Makes you want to investigate, huh? lol. The way DBPM is calculated is one of the reasons people hate it. It's also one of the best stats to use to show how difficult it is to quantify defense statistically. For one, there is no "real" calculation for DBPM. It's basically just BPM-OBPM. They take BPM and subtract what they believe the offensive component is (OBPM), thereby (hopefully) leaving the defensive component, DBPM. One of the problems with this is how the various stats are weighted by position that leads to weird anomalies like C's that get a lot of assists having "inflated" numbers. All this is why Jokic's career DBPM is only slightly behind David Robinson's and the #2 all-time (depending on calculation). On one DBPM list I saw, I think Kyle Anderson was in the top-10 ahead of Ducan and Hakeem, and I'm not sure Kawhi was even in the top 30 or 40. I don't know if DBPM is taken very seriously, tbh - I know it wasn't in the past. Be wary of people who say that boxscore stats don't/can't reflect defensive ability very well, then take 2 boxscore stats like BPM and OBPM, that rely on offensive and defensive boxscore stats, subtract them, and come up with a defensive stat that tells you how good a defensive player someone is. I don't mind anomalies in stats, but when there are so many questionable ones in a stat, you have to say "time to move on". It always seemed fishy to me. At least it isn't one I'd use to win any type of argument.
He is a great offensive mind but to suggest that Joker is the best defender .....lmao that is a stretch indeed.... But credit given where it is due, he is not a bad defender when he puts his mind to it and he is surrounded by great wing defense. His flops probably count as good Defense as the league has helped him there.
Jokic is such an anomalous/exceptional player in terms of what he does well that other centers don't do well, that he exposes the flaws within DBPM. lol. Maybe Reed is similar. They actually changed the formula to calculate BPM (a component of DBPM) a while back after one of Westbrook's crazy seasons where he averaged a triple double. That's how much he blew the calculation up because no guard should be rebounding that much (or that's the reasoning from what I recall - I don't remember what the old positional weightings were, tbh), and his numbers were so far ahead of anyone's, it was an anomaly even for the season he had. Hopefully Reed can eventually blow it up, too. lol.
It likes blocks too, which Reed has good block rate at. Fun stat: Jalen Green's '23 season, played early 2000 more minutes than Reed's rookie year total. 4 times more minutes than Reed. Total blocks - Jalen '23: 18 Reed '25: 17 .. (Its showing Jalen was not good, though Jalen did get a little better under Ime. But its to show that Reed put in work) Reed this year would have 10 blocks at the same minutes point of last year. The point being, Reed actually put in underrated disruption on D even last season, twice better blocks rate last year I think it's why adv stats put Reed as a positive or neutral last year even with his bad offense. Reed's '"dbpm" grades out well Still I'd easily take unlisted Amen on D every day over Reed
For sure, Amen's potential on D is the elite amongst elites, he puts so much pressure on the opponent......
