RealGM

Does anyone know of a statistic that isolates and measures a low post defender's effectiveness in playing one-on-one defense. I will use Josh Smith as an example. He is a great roving defender, but is pushed around by the bulkier big men in the league in the post. Is there a stat that would demostrate his ineffectiveness in such match-ups? I'd actually like to use it to identify effective role playing post defenders though. I appreciate any links, feedback, etc. Thanks guys.

EDIT: I should have specified that I need to know where to locate these statistics as well. Thank again.

Another acceptable measure for my purposes would be measuring a defender's effectiveness by the opposing team centers' FG% when the player is in the game. Defense against opposing centers is of particular interest to me. Thanks again.

maybe the peopole in statistical analysis will help u

Opp PER is close I guess. Usually if you are a good post defender, the opp PER will be pretty low. Not always the case. But I know Yao had a ridiculous opp PER for years. It was in the single digits when the average was 15.

It isn't perfect though because obviously sometimes your man will score or get a rebound because you had to help on somebody else.

Rod700 wrote:Another acceptable measure for my purposes would be measuring a defender's effectiveness by the opposing team centers' FG% when the player is in the game. Defense against opposing centers is of particular interest to me. Thanks again.

I will give it a shot. I just noticed that no one hardly ever posts there, and I thought the question would likely go unanswered.

Solid Snake wrote:Opp PER is close I guess. Usually if you are a good post defender, the opp PER will be pretty low. Not always the case. But I know Yao had a ridiculous opp PER for years. It was in the single digits when the average was 15.

It isn't perfect though because obviously sometimes your man will score or get a rebound because you had to help on somebody else.

Good deal. I appreciate it man.

mitchweber wrote:Yeah, there's actually a new board just for this kind of stuff, so I'm going to go ahead and move this there.

Ah, it's a new board. That's why there haven't been many posts yet. Moving the thread sounds good.

Have you checked www.82games.com? For individual players, you can click on "by position," and get a breakdown of how opponenet (supposedly) did against the player. For instance, for Josh Smith, the breakdown says he was terrific against SFs, got pushed around some by PFs, and got abused pretty heavily by Cs.

http://www.82games.com/0809/08ATL11.HTM#bypos

Inexact figures, really. I suppose the only way to usefully assess is to manually identify post players on opposing teams and assess their interior FG% as opposed to their normal average. This, of course, makes assumptions of a one-to-one relationship between your nominated player (e.g. Josh Smith) and the performance of your nominated low-post offensive player (e.g. Carlos Boozer).

If on-off figures ever get fine grained enough to assess different types of shots (in the paint, mid-range) during a player's time on-court, and include stats like steals (once again, against manually determined post players), blocks and turnovers, you'd get closer.

I'd love to get my hands on 82 games raw data, fwiw.