Intersting attempt to measure shooting defense by 538: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/a-better-way-to-evaluate-nba-defense/ Of interest - Harden comes out rated pretty highly in this, towards the top 50 or so players int he leauge. actually even the best player on the Rockets last year. Steph Curry is middle-of-pack Ariza is woeful, as is James Ennis, Ricky Rubio, Rajon Rondo. Westbrook is bad too. There's a severe penalty for gambling and failing for steals by this metric as it leads to open shots.
Yea but you can't make a cool compilation YouTube video out of numbers and words. How are TV talking heads supposed to use this in their takes about Harden's defense?
This reminds me of when everyone had Iverson as one of the best defenders at the guard position when he was playing. Sure he was always tops in steals but man did he gamble a lot. Iverson should be very thankful he had McKie and Snow playing behind him.
Tall players are good at lowering shooting accuracy. This is a nice confirmation of that, but so much of NBA defense is related to switching and screening now. It'd be much more interesting to have a breakdown of how players do on specific types of plays. That's something a coaching staff (or fanboard) could use to evaluate a defensive scheme.
We should have also signed him to a huge contract just so that we can trade him down the road. Surely everyone remembered when the Wizards let everyone in the NBA know that Kelly Oubre was available for a $15 million Trevor Ariza.
Of course Draymond will come out on top on a rating named after him. That being said, we don’t need a metric to tell us he’s very good and Rondo is piss poor. Probably other ratings would show the same.
I want to say that guys like Ariza etc that are reputationally good but numerically bad is because they always get a tough cover, but that doesn't seem to make sense. PJ Tucker, Pat Beverley etc all have pretty good numbers On the other side, Ariza's numbers are probably slightly exaggerated by spending all of 2018-2019 playing huge minutes on brutal teams - by my quick math he's probably closer to a -1 rating if you exclude last season - still bottom 20 but not bottom 10.
I don't even know if he's bottom-20 bad. All I know is that his presence on the team last year wouldn't have made a bit of difference, at least not in a positive way.
The main thing Ariza brought that was missing last year was his rebounding. He was a very good rebounder for his position, and the Rockets were terrible at defensive rebounding last year, especially noticeable against the Warriors in the playoffs.
Those are averages.. players are not computers but humans. some prefer to not give a **** for even full season to just lock in when it matters. Some go hard all year but dont have that another gear. Trevor had it
According to this stat Harden is a better defender than PJ tucker and slightly better than Patrick Beverly.
This seems like a critical piece that makes this metric not-very-good without other data. If you're so terrible a defender that you're getting blown by or losing your man a lot, you're not going to be the closest defender in many cases, and you're not penalized for it. It also doesn't account for who you're guarding (which doesn't seem that difficult to incorporate, unlike the above). You're treated as though you're always guarding an average opponent. But if you're always guarding the other team's weakest player, you get rewarded, and vice-versa.
except Trevor Ariza stopped trying last season. He went straight to losing teams for the money. He knew what he was doing.
Stinks. Just stinks. Methodology and the idea that contests are all that matter on defense. I wouldn’t even consult this for part of the picture.
