Post#1891 » by Rainyy » Sun Apr 2, 2017 4:39 am
Another great game from Lopez. Lopez gets no respect, even from Nets fans.
By the description of some posters, you'd think PnR defense was 90% of basketball and Lopez spent every defensive possession playing patty cake with his imaginary Disney friends.
Granted, we didn't play the best offensive teams in the league, but the Brooklyn Nets were 11th in DRTG for the month of March (104.8).
I'm sorry, but even in a small sample, this feat would be impossible if Lopez were as bad as a defender as some make him out to be (and given he played so many minutes this month, anchoring our defense). I actually think this month is an indicator of our future defensive prowess. Our better defenders have become staples of our rotation (LeVert, IW, Lin, RHJ, Acy), Atkinson is figuring out how to coach, and the team is clicking.
One question I have asked is: how many plus defenders have started next to Lopez since the 12-70 season? It's a legitimate question folks need to answer because otherwise you may be implicitily blaming Lopez for his teammates' defensive struggles. Defense is a team concept and if there are 0-1 plus defenders on the team and everyone else is average or worse, there is a zero percent chance that team will be even average defensively, no matter how well Lopez plays. Off the top of my head, the only player I can name is Gerald Wallace. We've always had putrid defensive 4s and wings. Only decent guys we've had are AA, KG, Ak47, and Livingston, none of whom Lopez got significant time with.
I would still call Lopez an "above average" defender overall, despite obvious holes in his game.
I blame hyper-scrutiny when it comes to looking at the PnR for unfair assessments of Lopez. People have an expectation that Lopez is bad at defending the PnR so naturally it is something they focus heavily on. A few problems emerge: (1) confirmation bias; (2) Nirvana fallacy (failure to meet idealized expectations); and related to (2), (3) lack of COMPARATIVE assessment. (3) is most problematic. I think people focus so heavily on Lopez's PnR defense in vacuum, that they lose sight of how it is defended around the league.
In reality, the PnR is really, really hard to defend, and very rarely is it defended perfectly. There is a reason it is the most popular play in the NBA. If I were to scrutinize every other big in the league as closely as some of you scrutinize Lopez, I could point out imperfections in execution in 99% of plays.
News flash: every big cheats off screens. Some teams really practice extreme hedging, but that is a specialized strategy prone to its own vulnerabilities. I've watched games where you guys are ripping on Lopez for not attacking the screen, when Marc Gasol is literally doing the exact same thing on every other possession. You're holding Lopez to an impossible standard.
Seriously, try it some time. I challenge you all to choose opposing bigs the remainder of the year and just watch how they play defense every possession. I guarantee you can find fault in them on the majority of possessions, simply because big men are so involved in possessions. Prok was talking about Noel the other day and I scrutinized him like you guys do Lopez. If he were on our team, you would have been hammering him every play.
This herein is the problem with analyzing defense. The defensive metrics aren't very good so we are left with anecdotal evidence, which introduces a ton of biases.
That's not how you treat your players and expect to win, with that attitude the Nets don't deserve nice things.