Jordi Fernandez is the key to unlocking Brooks in the first place and ironically he is rebuilding in Brooklyn. Could be a reunion brewing.
Yes but two consecutive seasons of top 3PT defense with radically different teams is the start of a VERY strong trend. It's not hard to see how you can design a defense to make 3PTers more difficult. You can see it in the way we play.
It’s definitely a thing with 3 point defense. Zach Lowe, the thinking basketball podcast guys and plenty of others have referenced it in discussing teams for many, many years now. On my phone this was the first article I found, I will try to dig up some more when I get home. https://thepowerrank.com/2013/10/29/3-point-defense-in-the-nba-skill-or-luck/
Honestly using someone's research from 11 years ago doesn't really help make your case, especially since that data was 10 years worth of data ending in 2012. Anyways let's just use Boston as an example given Udoka was part of that team. Their 3pt defense rank the past 10 years has been 2, 6, 1, 22, 1, 6, 1, 2, 3, 5. That means on average they're ranked 4.9th place when the average is 15.5. If you know anything about statistics, the odds that they were simply "that lucky" over the course of 10 seasons is incredibly low. Also in the past 10 years, Houston's rank in opponent 3pt%. 1, 21 (nightmare last Dwight/Lawson year), 3, 10, 1, 7, 28 (tank year), 17(tank year), 28(tank year), 1(this past season). Again, this suggest when the team was competing, they defended the 3 well. And when they were crap, they didn't defend the 3. Nothing about these number suggest that 3pt defense is based on luck.
Yes but we only know a fraction of the math in the universe so we don't really know what wins in the long run. In a mere 50-100 years they'll be laughing at our math. That's before taking into account how amateur we humans are at sports statistics vs math.
Not really sure why that wouldn’t help make the case. And it’s not my case. It’s the case of people who have studied this stuff as part of their job. And yes, I know stats. Engineering nerd. If you don’t like that guys research you can look at the tracking data and see that Houston’s opponents shot pretty poorly on “wide open” and “open” threes compared to league average last season. There’s definitely regression possibility there. And to take a step back I’m not saying that you can take it to the bank that we were just lucky and we are going to fall off a cliff on defense next season. I’m saying it’s possible our defense wasn’t quite as good as the final numbers say because of these two areas where luck plays a real factor and it favored us pretty strongly last season. Here’s a table I found that someone made from 2023-2024
I think someone somewhere pointed out that these "wide open 3s" were defined by how far the on ball defender was when it was shot. It skews the result because a step-back 3 is often defined as wide open because it creates a large separation between the shooter and the defender. Yet, step back 3 is more difficult than a spot up shot with a defender closing in. So a defense that forces the other team to do a lot of dancing and jab stepping to get open might look like they give up a lot of open shots but in fact they force a lot of difficult shots. Not saying that's what happened with the Rockets defense. But it seems that the tracking stats of this kind need to be taken with a grain of salt.
I found this research from the period of 2013 - 2021 to be quite good regarding the concept of "luck" when it comes to defending the 3pointer quite good and readable: https://www.thestrick.land/strick/a...point-defense-in-nba-advanced-stats-analytics For those who don't want to read the article, I'd sum up the points as follows: 1. While free throws are completely unguarded all of the time, and "FT-Defense" is likely completely variable from year-to-year, 3-pointers at the NBA level really aren't that far behind. Roughly 88% of the 3-point attempts in 2021 were classified as open (4+ feet of space) or wide open (6+ feet of space). 2. Variability from year to year, or "luck", is not an all-or-nothing proposition. We can acknowledge that there are definitely actions under the control of the team that can influence 3pt defense, while also acknowledging that these controllable factors may only play a small part in overall year-to-year variation. 3. Two of the most predictive variables for preventing accurate 3-point shooting are to force the opponent to shoot less of them (and especially shoot more midrange shots, 10-16ft), and to play better 2-point defense (the worse their FG% is inside the arc, the worse it usually is outside of it). These factors may be controllable based on scheme and talent. I think that Moneyball has conditioned a lot of us to assume that there are certain aspects of the game that are entirely variable, and there are no ways to influence it, like Voros McCracken's Defense Independent Pitching Statistics. This has been commonly applied to turnover differential (especially in fumble recoveries) in American Football as a red flag of regression to the mean on a season-by-season basis. In practice, relatively few stats are going to be purely chance-based.
I followed this stat all year … The 2024 Coach of the Year mentioned our 3PT defense in a pre-game interview, as late as March. He does not consider it luck. What these NBA coaches do apparently isn’t considered (and possibly not understood) by stat nerds who “study this.” What Daigneault said, which I thought everyone knew, is many NBA defenses are designed to get the ball in the worst shooters hands. And how do you do that…? First off, I don’t think people are aware of how few Tight and Very Tight 3s there are in a game vs the Open + Wide Open 3s. (If teams close, you pass it.) So basically, every 3PT defense is still going to have a Lot of Open+Wide Open 3s. Maybe we could say the best has the fewest attempts overall, (or fewest points from three), but that can be a sign of a bad transition and bad interior defense, too. But one thing is for sure, any defense designed to lower the opponent 3FG% isn’t going to achieve that by attempting to increase Tight to Very Tight attempts…there are so few to begin with. bottomline: So, what did Daigneault say? From Early March
I don't disagree there is certainly element of luck on whether any opponent 3 goes in or not exist. But if you're an engineer and has taken stat classes in college, you'd know that while luck exist in smaller sample sizes, eventually it's big enough to become a trend. In 2024 teams average 2879 3s a season. In 2013 that number was 1636. In 2003, the beginning of the research in your linked article, that number was 1204. In essence, last year teams shot as many 3s as 2013 and 2003 put together. That's why I'm saying you shouldn't be using research from so long ago on something that has clearly changed over time. And while I don't like to just appeal to authority as a cop out, but I think it's safe to say that with analytics spreading around in the NBA and the prominence of 3pt shooting, surely defenses today are more emphasized to stop them than 10-20 years ago. And yes, I have heard Lowe talk about 3pt luck, but when I hear it it's also refer to a small sample, i.e. for effecting player on/off numbers. I am pretty sure they've never said anything like "well they were 1st in defense last year but they were also best in 3pt defense so I'm going to assume they're gonna not be that good next year." I think you and I are talking mostly different things. The argument here isn't whether there's randomness to whether one or a hundred 3 pointers goes in or not due to defense or luck or offense or whatever. The argument is whether a team's high level of 3pt defense relative to the rest of the NBA is sustainable year to year. If we're using the baseball comparison, every analytics person agrees that offense and pitching are much more important than defense. It's why your slick fielding no-hit shortstop has basically become non-existent in today's MLB compared to the old days. But that doesn't mean baseball defense doesn't affect games. Just like defense also affect opponent 3pt shooting, even if it's not by much.
The rub is certainly going to be how much of 3pt defense is attributable to repeatable factors, and how much is purely due to luck. If the part that is controllable is a relatively small part of the whole, then sustainability year-over-year is going to more heavily influenced by variance. I would agree that just because a team finishes first or last in a category does not meant they are fate-bound to regress to the exact mean in the following seasons. However, when you do have a certain outlier category of shooting that is not backed up by other related defensive components, I think it's perfectly valid to be a bit worried that they may have just experienced the high side of variance. I don't have all the synergy numbers available, but generally, the best way to limit 3pt% is to force your opponent to shoot worse from 2pt%, and to overall limit 3pt attempts. The Rockets were fairly mediocre at both of these in 2023 -2024 (middle 3rd of the league). They also benefitted a lot from giving the opponents the 2nd most FT attempts per 100 possessions, while simultaneously "limiting" them to the 2nd worst FT%. Maybe you can argue that they selectively fouled their opponents with lower FT%, but that seems like a stretch. When the results are out of step with the fundamentals, that's where I'm going to start looking for regression to the mean. It is entirely possible that the defensive talent simply improves so much in 2024 - 2025, and that the 3pt-defense remains top notch. However, it would look a lot more sustainable if the Rockets were excelling in other areas of defense as well.
Could it be a tactical trade off? Being good at one area of defense might mean being exposed to other areas. For example, if you gave priority to closing out 3pt shooting, you might give up more penetration.
Dillon is having a pretty good olympic run with Canada where he is averaging 14.3 pts (14/28) and 60% (6/10) from 3. https://www.fiba.basketball/en/even...-paris-2024/teams/canada/210235-dillon-brooks
He's looking really good on both ends of the court tbh, enjoying watching him and our other guys play.
Brooks does not rebound, does not pass well, does not handle the ball well. Amen is an extreme upgrade over him in everything except shooting 3’s. Amen creates way more points with his defense, transition offense, offensive rebounding, and cutting than the few 3’s Brooks makes when he is hot. He is a good defensive player, but doesn’t hold a candle to Amen who can guard virtually every position on the court.
His shooting isn’t valuable at all really because nobody guards him or gives a crap if he’s open. He kills the spacing as much as amen does except amen is a threat as a lob guy
