I’ll do a deeper dive into the stats later today, but there are a few issues from just a cursory glance:
1. You’ve pointed out the most obvious. And they don’t seem to relay what’s being normalized.
2. You would expect bigs to have a greater number shots attempted against within 5 feet than guards. That is not the case here. So the stats are not necessarily telling us what we’re hoping to discover.
That said, even with the above issues, it’s pretty obvious Buddy is the team’s worse defender. He leads in most of the categories for attempts against. By how much n the exact magnitude are things that we may be able to figure out if we cross the data against each other and are able to find the league average n then calculate his deviation from the average.
Magnitude matters here because we’re dealing with small units where 2 or so shot attempts separates an average defender from a horrible defender.
Here's an average of the opponents made shots and the opponents FG%. Ranked by FG% and value > from team FG%. One obvious glaring issue here is it implies Cory Joseph is a worse defender than Buddy, which is absolutely not true.
Players FGM FG% % > FGM %
Wenyen Gabriel 0.871.60 0.540 29.9%
Nemanja Bjelica 3.687.73 0.444 6.8%
Cory Joseph 3.557.48 0.443 6.7%
Buddy Hield 4.7810.03 0.440 5.95%
Dewayne Dedmon 1.823.95 0.439 5.63%
Richaun Holmes 4.058.67 0.432 4.1%
De'Aaron Fox 4.379.22 0.430 3.58%
Harrison Barnes 4.8210.35 0.429 3.22%
Marvin Bagley III 3.477.30 0.424 2.02%
Yogi Ferrell 1.753.88 0.423
Bogdan Bogdanovic 3.627.93 0.422 1.6%
Harry Giles III 1.373.00 0.417
Trevor Ariza 3.086.77 0.417 3.3%
Justin James 1.423.18 0.404
Caleb Swanigan 0.471.10 0.383
DaQuan Jeffries 0.421.58 0.158
Here's a Rank by FGM and % from team's FGM avg. Barnes and Buddy seems to be our worse defenders
Players FGM Value > FGM Avg
Harrison Barnes 4.82 77.1%
Buddy Hield 4.78 75.87%
De'Aaron Fox 4.37 60.5%
Richaun Holmes 4.05 48.9%
Nemanja Bjelica 3.68 35.43%
Bogdan Bogdanovic 3.62 32.98%
Cory Joseph 3.55 30.52%
Marvin Bagley III 3.47 27.46%
Trevor Ariza 3.08 13.37%
Dewayne Dedmon 1.82
Yogi Ferrell 1.75
Justin James 1.42
Harry Giles III 1.37
Wenyen Gabriel 0.87
Caleb Swanigan 0.47
DaQuan Jeffries 0.42
If we focus on on Fox, Buddy, and Barnes. And look only at their % greater than the average for Opponents Field Goals Made and Opponents FG %, we get the following:
Buddy = 1.86349 (the worse on the team), 80.2% worse than the team average.
Barnes = 1.828143, 76.8% worse than the team average.
Fox = 1.66314, 60.9% worse than the team average.