My argument was that awards are based on reputation.
- Marc was indeed amazing in 2013, and numbers showed it. (another guy, who doesn't get defensive boards, but still helps his team control defensive rebounding)
- Bulls were arguably best defensive team in 2014, full of guys with good defense. Player with most minutes played got award. Hibbert, who was a cornerstone of a slightly better defensive team, got penalized for not getting defensive rebounds, even though Pacers got 76.5% of those available, while Bulls with Noah on the floor collected 75.4%. (Noah grabbed 11.7 def.rebs per 100 possessions, while Hibbert just 7.2)
- I gave you an article, that shows, that Kawhi is not as good as his reputation suggests.
You frame your argument, using complete +/-, that looks at both sides of the floor, but defensive +/- is much more reliable as it depends mostly on physical ability, understanding of defense and effort (besides main factor - teammates, of course). First two things are not subject to quick improvement after 2-3 years in the league, and third factor is controlled well by demanding coach. Offensive +/- has just too many moving parts to make a valid assessment. You're better off just looking at skillsets.
All the negative in +/- for Durant that year came from defense, which is understandable for 20 y.o. thin guy. The fact, that some guy couldn't look that up, doesn't make statistics invalid.
A lot of mediocre bigs will contribute more on D next year than KAT.
Davis is close to being a finished product. He has a defined role at this point, and he's not excelling in that role, while someone like Kosta Koufos does. There's a reason, Davis had to settle for a minimum contract on a pathetic team. We'll see, what he will get this year.
P.S. Bulk stats are one of the biggest illusions in basketball.
I have to say, I disagree with pretty much everything you said here. Whether those three guys deserved their DPOY awards or not is irrelevant to this argument. Do you agree that they are at least
good defensive players -- as in they are players that improve their team's defense when they're on the floor? The only reason I picked those three guys is because I had assumed we could at least agree on that. If so, how come PPP shows that the Spurs are pretty much the same team defensively whether he's on the court or not? How come PPP shows that the Bulls are pretty much the same team defensively whether Noah is on the court or not? Did Marc Gasol score much higher on +/- PPP because he's a much more dominant defender than either Kawhi Leonard and Joakim Noah or is it merely that Memphis had no decent backup C that season?
If I told Greg Popovich he should trade Kawhi Leonard for a better defender what do you think he would say? If I told Tom Thibodeau that Joakim Noah isn't needed in his defense what do you think he would say? If you showed Pop the vantage sports article that says Kawhi Leonard doesn't deserve DPOY because he's a poor man-to-man defender don't you think he would just roll his eyes at you and walk away? I do. Opponent FG% alone doesn't tell you enough about a player to make that judgement. Which players was he guarding? Did they take more shots or less shots than usual? Did they get to the foul line against him at a high or low rate?
It's not just complete +/- that I don't like -- I don't think +/- in any form is a reliable stat. You said that defensive+/- depends on physical ability, understanding of defense, and effort. Actually, while those things are true of defense itself, defensive +/- is measuring one thing and one thing only -- how many points did a team allow with Player X on the court, how many points did a team allow with Player X off the court. That means it's measuring the exact same thing that overall +/- is measuring. You're eliminating his own team's scoring from the equation but have you actually isolated his individual defensive impact? I don't see how you can claim that when there are always 10 players on the court at the same time.
DRPM is more interesting to me because the results it generates do mostly align with perception. Guys like Bogut, Gobert, Chandler, and Cousins show up at the top of the list for Centers and guys like Matt Bonner and Andrea Bargnani show up at the bottom. It's tempting to say "this seems to be working, let's go with that" but do you actually understand where the stat comes from? It's still just an averaging stat with some attempt made to normalize the results across different teams and filter out .
Here's one attempt at explaining what RPM is actually doing -- though I don't think it makes it any more clear. In fact, the more I read about it (
here) (
here) the less stock I place in RPM as a useful means of analysis. If it takes an entire essay of contextualizing to explain why it's accurate in some cases and inaccurate in others, you can't just throw it out there in an argument and expect me to agree with it no questions asked. In combination with other stas, sure. On it's own? No way. At the point where you're coming up with rationalizations to explain why the stat likes this player and not that one, aren't you doing exactly what the stat is supposed to prevent you from doing -- making assumptions on the basis of subjective observation?
For another example of why this kind of stat is problematic, let's look at a similar kind of metric -- NBA.com's League Lineup stats. Here's every lineup the Lakers played together this year:
http://stats.nba.com/league/lineups/#!/?sort=PLUS_MINUS&dir=1&Season=2014-15&SeasonType=Regular Season&TeamID=1610612747
If we sort them by +/- we find out that Ed Davis is in 6 of the Lakers best 10 lineups. We also find out that he's in 5 of the Lakers worst 10 lineups. So far this tells me nothing but there's also a lot of really small sample sizes here. Let's filter out any lineup that played less than 5 games together and less than 10 minutes together per game.
http://stats.nba.com/league/lineups/#!/?sort=PLUS_MINUS&dir=1&Season=2014-15&SeasonType=Regular Season&TeamID=1610612747&CF=GP*G*5|MIN*G*10
So now we know that the Lakers best lineup this season was:
Jordan Clarkson, Wayne Ellington, Wesley Johnson, Tarik Black, and Jordan Hill
The same unit with Jeremy Lin and Ed Davis in place of Clarkson and Black was also pretty good.
Every other lineup was a net negative, some worse than others.
Nick Young played 1000 minutes off the bench for the Lakers and his name shows up once on this list, in their worst lineup.
With Carlos Boozer on the court, the results were generally disastrous.
Other than that, I'm struggling to see any useful analysis I can pull from this information.
Taken as a whole, the only thing I can definitively say is that Nick Young and Carlos Boozer hurt the Lakers this year.
Everyone else shows up all over the board.
Back to Ed Davis, there's two other things I want to look at:
(1) ESPN's DRPM has three Lakers PF on the list (I'm disregarding Julius Randle's 1 game sample)
Carlos Boozer -2.36 , Ed Davis -0.89 , Ryan Kelly -0.78
All of these guys played a good amount of minutes this season. 1692 for Boozer, 1840 for Davis, and 1233 for Kelly.
For Ed Davis to be a net negative defensively, we have to believe that the Lakers are better defensively when he's not on the court. DRPM says the Lakers are slightly better defensively in the 1233 minutes that Ryan Kelly played but they're significantly worse in the 1692 minutes that Carlos Boozer played. That doesn't make sense. Unless these guys played together at the same time. That's right, from the League Lineup stats we know that Ed Davis played the bulk of his minutes alongside either Jordan Hill or Carlos Boozer. I gave you Carlos Boozer's DRPM, what was Jordan Hill's? He played 1874 minutes and his DRPM was -1.42.
Was Ed Davis really that bad defensively or is he a casualty of sharing the bulk of his playing time with two of the Lakers worst defenders? I honestly don't know because, as I said before, it takes way too much rationalization for these stats to make sense for me. I struggle to see valid explanations for why DRPM dropped Marc Gasol from the best defensive center in the league last year to the 20th best this year or why Jimmy Butler went from the #6 SG last year to #19 this year. Tony Parker was the #25 PG last year, this year he's # 83. Mike Dunleavy, James Jones, Hedo Turkoglu and 20 other SFs were ranked better defensively than Lebron James last year. Ed Davis on Memphis had a DRPM of 1.38 last year. This year on the Lakers it was -0.89 despite his block %, steal %, and defensive rebounding % all going up.
(2) Basketball-reference's competing stat --
Box Plus Minus -- is an aggregate of everything a player does that can be counted in a box score. This is subject to the same problems that all counting stats are, but for me it's far less problematic than RPM because it doesn't show the same extreme fluctuations based on who else was on the floor.
Defensive Box Plus Minus gave only two Lakers players a positive score this season. Robert Sacre at 0.4 and Ed Davis at 1.9 which actually puts him
#49 overall in the league this year. Here's a list of all the Sacramento Kings players who had a higher DBPM than Ed Davis this year: DeMarcus Cousins at 3.3 (11th overall). That's it. Clearly the results are skewed heavily in favor of frontcourt players. The only PGs who even make the top 100 are Westbrook (#38), Marcus Smart (#70), Rondo (#82), Wall (#83), Bledsoe (#92), MCW (#93), and Elfrid Payton (#99). But this list of the leagues best defenders seems no less accurate than the one produced by DRPM. There are some out liars on both of them, but the bulk of the list looks reasonable.
Lest this devolve any further into a "my stats are better than your stats" argument, I'm just going to say that I don't know what to make of RPM yet, I just think it's problematic. Counting stats are problematic too, for different reasons but they have a longer track record to draw analysis from. Taken together perhaps we can learn a small piece of the puzzle from each of them. If DWS, DBPM, and dRtg all say Ed Davis was the best defender on the Lakers this year
and he was one of the league leaders in rebounding and shotblocking this year
and he had a much higher DRPM than the frontcourt players he shared the court with the most, and his DRPM score (a stat which clearly has a wide degree of variance from season to season) says he was a net positive last year, to me the bulk of the evidence is suggesting that Ed Davis is not a poor defensive player.
