Lakers defense last year -- not as bad as we thought?

[ArC_man]

Came across an interesting article

The Lakers' defense ranked in the middle of the pack overall, but they had the second-best defense on isolations and the best defense against the roll man in pick-and-rolls (while being mediocre against pick-and-roll ball-handlers).

http://www.rotoworld.com/articles/nba/4 ... he-numbers

Looking through the spreadsheet (linked at the bottom of the article), we were at the top of the league in terms of defense on isolations and better than league average at defending the pnr overall. This suggests that our defensive woes weren't due to personnel deficiencies (although I'm not suggesting we don't have some poor individual defenders on our team).

Our 5 worst categories were transition, offensive rebounding, postups, cuts, and handoffs. I believe our poor transition defense was magnified by our offense. SSOL, jacking up 3s early in the shot clock gives opponents plenty of long rebounds/transition opportunities and doesn't leave our players in positions to effectively get back in transition. Allowing offensive rebounds and poor defense on postups can be attributed to fielding small lineups with poor overall rebounders (eg: playing Kelly and Sacre together, Wes Johnson at PF, not playing Kaman and Hill as much as we should have). Defending cuts and hand-offs I think could be improved with more practice and better team defensive concept.

I think our team this year has the potential to be significantly better on defense than we were last year.

How much can Byron Scott improve our defense?

[TyCobb]

I also think we can improve our defense quite a bit. It's no surprise we brought most of the same guys back from last season, so we know the FO thinks they're capable of playing good D. Hell, our most significant increase will come from the loss of Marshall.

[AdonisDeMarion]

MDA was a bad fit, SSOL works on 2K tho

[Dr Aki]

a lot of it probably be blamed on pau and his nonexistent defense

and having no point guards for half the year wouldn't have helped either

the sky's the limit on defense, but i'll believe it once i see it first

[cashflo]

Boozer has been on a good defensive team .. He isn't the answer but I'm hoping he understands team defense concept and can help out in someway.

[aaron_gray]

Does anyone else remember that stretch when Sacre was putting up blocks like crazy