I'm not sure how to put a link in here but if you go to basketball reference.com and look under active leaders for defensive rating, Tony Parker is ranked 28th. He is the 2nd highest ranked PG, Rondo is 8th overall. Chris Paul is 29th. A few names on that list raise an eyebrow, but it's a good indicator of defensive prowess.
Greg Oden?
- Thread starter Nikolizzle
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I'm not sure how to put a link in here but if you go to basketball reference.com and look under active leaders for defensive rating, Tony Parker is ranked 28th. He is the 2nd highest ranked PG, Rondo is 8th overall. Chris Paul is 29th. A few names on that list raise an eyebrow, but it's a good indicator of defensive prowess.
Bricklayer
Don't Make Me Use The Bat
here's the thing about advanced stats: most of them suck. When they start telling you things that you know are not true, you toss the staat, not your brain.
Tony Parker is not and never has been a great defender. He plays with some great defenders. he has a great defensive coach. Tony Parker? No.
Wait, disregard stats that says he's a good defender....oh ok. SMH.
Bricklayer
Don't Make Me Use The Bat
Yep. You disregard or delve further into any stat which does not correlate with reality. Because even the most advanced stat in the world is incredibly laughably primitive compared to a human brain watching and instantly considering all the variables.
Did you know for instance that Tony Parker has a better career DRTG than Gary Payton or Joe Dumars? Are you really ready to make that argument? What's more likely, that we have all missed Parker's defensive wizardry over his career, or that its a flawed metric sucking up a ton of teamwide defensive competence and pace instead of simple individual ability?
Give it 50 years and we might have some supercomputer capable of watching the game itself and exactly correlating thousands of different variables and every movement a player makes. Right now all stats are extremely crude windows into reality, and the more advance they get, the more it means some human has put themselves between you and the action and made decisions about what he/she thinks should be universal balances.
macadocious
Starter
You baffle me sometimes, you use stats to make and argument on one hand, then on the other hand you disregard stats. It's like you are a lawy....oh never mind.
So take that information, lets say that the order might be somewhat jumbled because you say they suck, but Parker at the very least is good enough to be in the list. Perhaps you have missed his defensive abilities. And whether its individual ability or in a team concept.....are you trying to say that he's a defensive liability that gets covered by his teammates and Pop's schemes? Yeah, I don't see that.
Bricklayer
Don't Make Me Use The Bat
I use stats to illustrate an argument I already know to be true. I have never looked at a statistic and said, oh, look at that! Kevin Martin is actually a better offensive player than Jordan!
Meanwhile, while I of course think people really should just take my word on things at this point, oddly many are stubborn about it, so I use stats as props.
I can tell you that Boogie is an excellent rebounder with great strength and some of the best hands I have ever seen, I can also tell you that he fell off last year as an offensive rebounder because he largely quit doing his off balance flip/tip/tip routine, which raised his FG% but cut his offensive rebounds in the process. But if you don't know me well enough to accept all that on my word, then its time to break out his rebounding and FG% numbers from 2 years ago vs. last year, along with shot attempts and percentages at the rim both years, and offensive and total rebounding numbers per 36 to eliminate any fuzziness. All of the statistical workup though isn't driving my argument. I know everything that it is going to say before I lay it out there. Its for illustration purposes.Now I will in fact use stats as a way to introduce myself to a player in college, Europe etc. that I did not formerly know. Its only a start, but you can figure out something about playing styles just from a basic statline and then go on to watch and figure out details. So some of it may simply be a question of knowledge. If you watch a player play, in Tony Parker's case literally hundreds of times at this point, and then you have somebody come along and drop a stat in front of you telling you something that you have never seen...if you accept that you either have no confidence (perhaps with good reason) or really haven't been watching those games. On the other hand if you are a casual fan, or a fan without consistent TV access, or whatever, and somebody drops a stat in front of you, you have to consider it.
Did you know Carlos Boozer is 13th on the active list for DRTG by the way? The argument I would never make is that therefore he must be a good defender. In fact he's spent good chunks of his career playing for Jerry Sloan (although they weren't actually a great defensive team then) and Tom Thibodeau, and that stat let's those things bleed over. Meanwhile Drew Gooden is #31, Chris Kaman is #33, while Battier is only #34. That stat will credit great defensive players if they create a great defensive team through their talents. Unfortunately it will also suck up their less talented teammates.
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jalfa
Starter
the real problem with your argument is that you're using the stat incorrectly. DRTG is a great, great stat, if you use it to evaluate team performance. on an individual level it's near worthless. lineups featuring Tony Parker played great defense, better than that of the teams of Chris Paul et al. this, however, has little to do with their individual defensive prowess and a lot more with the kinds of teams they've been on. naturally, Parker, having been paired with Tim Duncan and Gregg Popovich for his entire career, has a distinctive advantage here. you can kinda try to make cases with DRTG on an individual level if you look at the impact of the player on the team's defense (108 with player X, 102 without him or something) but even that can easily get iffy, since a lot depends on the player's replacement, the other players on the units he's not on, and the kind of units they're playing against.
and Brick is absolutely right in that, if a stat, regardless of how advanced, seems counter intuitive, there's usually a reason for that and it warrants further investigation. Tony Parker isn't a great defender. he's solid, has improved, but his style of play on the offensive side, the amount of ground he covers, the speed he does it with, and the energy expended to do so don't allow him to expend the same kind of energy on that end. when the Sports VU articles hit late last season, a lot of the articles mentioned how that technology has made Pop and the Spurs more forgiving concerning his sometimes taking plays off on the defensive end for that exact reason.
William Blake
Bench
I agree.
RAPM is a far more interesting stat to evaluate individual defense impact. I don't want to get too technical so I'll just say that it measures the defensive and offensive impact (per 100 possessions/48 minutes) of a certain player compared to the average NBA player, while trying to eliminate the "Parker-Duncan bias" as much as the data allows it*.
Take a look at last year's San Antonio Spurs and it's pretty clear who anchored the defense and who didn't.
*It's a fancy regression but it's still a regression. If a coach makes sure to ALWAYS pair his weak defenders with great ones there's no way to make the first guy's lack of defensive ability show up in the numbers.
http://blog.mysanantonio.com/spursnation/2013/03/18/is-tony-parker-a-better-defender-than-we-think/
Figured out how to paste a link. Look, I use stats as a partial tool in evaluating. I trust my judgement as I've seen enough of Parkerto know that he's a good / great defender. Maybe he's not great and just good.....either/or but what he's not is a poor defender. Read the article. It gives good info.....stats wise but also straight from Pop's mouth, who tends to tell it like it is. In the article it mentions opponent individual PER when matched up with a player....Parker better than league average and statistically on par with Tony Allen....statistically. I think most if not all would agree that Tony Allen is one of the best, if not the best perimeter defenders currently in the game. But if you read the article, it gives you other statistical indicators of Parker's defense and then Pop's endorsement which would be the best indicator.
Figured out how to paste a link. Look, I use stats as a partial tool in evaluating. I trust my judgement as I've seen enough of Parkerto know that he's a good / great defender. Maybe he's not great and just good.....either/or but what he's not is a poor defender. Read the article. It gives good info.....stats wise but also straight from Pop's mouth, who tends to tell it like it is. In the article it mentions opponent individual PER when matched up with a player....Parker better than league average and statistically on par with Tony Allen....statistically. I think most if not all would agree that Tony Allen is one of the best, if not the best perimeter defenders currently in the game. But if you read the article, it gives you other statistical indicators of Parker's defense and then Pop's endorsement which would be the best indicator.
Gary
All-Star
Having your cake and eating it too... That's the motto for some posters here. My eyes say Parker does fine in the team defense role. Team stats prove it. I am not saying he's a great individual defender or anything but he does play well in the role that he's put in.
Come on now, you argue for stats to back up your opinion, and you argue against stats to back up your opinion too.
Brick said:
Come on now, you argue for stats to back up your opinion, and you argue against stats to back up your opinion too.
Don't think anyone's refuted that ... but you wouldn't call him a good defender/ defensive player by any means. He does his job, and does it well. That job does not involve shutting down guys or being a top notch defensive player. But he is no big liability on defense either.
rainmaker
Hall of Famer
His knee problems have absolutely nothing to do with the pounding of the NBA. Physically, he'd have zero problems with the league. His knee however might not be able to handle 30 mins of rollerblading along the beach.
My memory may be fuzzy, but when I saw him fracture his patella on live television, I'm pretty sure he wasn't on the beach.
rainmaker
Hall of Famer
My point was more it's a structural/genetic issue. I don't see his knee problems having occurred due to the pounding he takes in the NBA or the physicality of the league. He had knee issues well before he stepped on an NBA court. Knee injuries are a structural issue most of the time. Could an 82 game schedule be an issue? Sure, but he had issues well before he ever tried playing an 82 game schedule. Livingston's knee injuries aren't a result of not being able to handle the pounding either. They're also a structural/genetic issue.
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