payitforward wrote:It's "fine" -- ? what does that mean? Does it mean it's "good?"
Here are a couple of things I learned in the 2d grade: "Bad" means worse than average; "Good" means better than average; "Average" means neither good nor bad. Can we work on that basis in assessing Myles Turner or any other player? In his rebounding or any other aspect of his play? I hope so.
Now, the average NBA 5 gets 8.5 defensive rebounds per 40 minutes. That's "average" -- not "good" & not "bad." In his age 21 season, Thomas Bryant got 9+. That's good. This year, Nikola Vucevic got 10.7. That's really good. Joel Embiid got 12 -- that's really really good.
This year, Myles Turner got 7. That's bad. In his age 21 season, Myles Turner also got 7. That was also bad.
It means it's
fine - Turner's been mentioned several times in here as if he's this catastrophically bad rebounder in every way, and I wanted to point out that a significant portion of that perception is brought about by his waaay below-average offensive rebounding numbers. It seems likely to me that there's some useful context to be found here vis a vis his role in the Pacers offense, but that's not even the point of my post!
I'm simply pointing out that his
defensive rebounding, while not outstanding, isn't really notably poor either - his rate numbers are comparable to those of Draymond Green, John Collins, Blake Griffin, Jazz-era Derrick Favors, or Tristan Thompson, the latter three of which
also shared a lot of minutes with extremely strong rebounding presences, but are not, themselves, thought of as poor rebounders.
payitforward wrote:Nice work cherry-picking his age 22 season, when Turner actually zoomed all the way up to the nose-bleed heights of 8 defensive boards per 40 minutes -- also bad. How about 2016-17? Back when Damontas Sabonis was not yet with the team? How many did Myles get that year when there was no meanie stealing his boards?
He got 7. Bad.
[...]
Nah. Let's not. Instead, let's look at whether he's a good rebounder. He's not. He's a below average rebounder -- which means bad, & it has nothing to do with Damontas Sabonis.
I don't think it's cherry-picking to use a player's last two seasons to get a sense of their recent statistical performance, nor do I think player performances exist in a vacuum of context... I don't think this is controversial. By the same token, my usual argument applies in that defensive rebounding
rate is the more useful piece of data here, not just the raw numbers. For the whole McMillan era, the Pacers were routinely near the bottom of the league in pace.
Speaking of Love and Griffin, there's an interesting story told by how their DRB%, and
especially ORB% have changed over the years as they've changed teams and found new roles in their offenses. Chris Bosh, too. Or, you could simply look at the numbers in a vacuum and wonder where the heck their rebounding ability has run off to. Perhaps the work of the Monstars.
payitforward wrote:Now this is another matter entirely! "Enormous" -- what a great word. Please quantify. By how many percentage points did Myles Turner lower the FG% of the guys he was defending within 6 feet of the rim?
Sure, it was a drop of 10.9 percentage points below what would be expected (on 7.7 attempts a game). At/around that volume, he's behind Brook Lopez (-17.4%, 7.3 attempts), Rudy Gobert (-12.7%, 9.4 attempts), Hassan Whiteside (-12.6%, 9.7 attempts), and Kristaps Porzingis (-11.1%, 7.5 attempts).
payitforward wrote:...he's ...more capable than most of extending his defensive impact out in open space to the perimeter....
Glad you mentioned it -- since all points count! So, how much did Myles Turner lower the FG% of guys he was defending overall -- not just w/in 6 feet of the rim? By how many % points?
Of course, that may not be the whole story -- players may fear taking shots when he's defending them, whether close or far from the rim or both. Is that the case? Did players also average fewer shot attempts per 40 minutes against Myles Turner than they did against other Centers?
This is where I start to hate the walled garden of the NBA's tracking stats API, but I can get some decent answers. On all 2 pointers, Turner's blended % differential while defending shots is -6% (10.9 attempts). On 3 pointers, it's +3.3% (3.1 attempts). Unfortunately the NBA doesn't provide any kind of matchup-specific data - while info on how guards shoot 3s when Turner is made to switch on the perimeter (mostly what that stat is measuring) is useful, it's be great to get a sense for how possessions develop when a guard draws Turner on the perimeter and then initiates the possession with a drive or similar. Alas, a pipe dream.
Some comparisons (like I said, the NBA API for this is pretty clunky, so this is just the first couple of names that came to mind):
- Turner: -10.9%, 7.7 attempts (< 6 feet); -6.0%, 10.9 attempts (all 2 pointers); +3.3%, 3.1 attempts (3 pointers)
- Mitchell Robinson: -8.4%, 4.6 attempts (< 6 feet); -4.7%, 7.8 attempts (all 2 pointers); +3.6%, 3.8 attempts (3 pointers)
- Thomas Bryant: -1.4%, 6.2 attempts (< 6 feet); -1.5%, 9.6 attempts (all 2 pointers); +9.8%, 2.6 attempts (3 pointers)
- Anthony Davis: -11.2%, 5.3 attempts (< 6 feet); -9.6%, 9.1 attempts (all 2 pointers); -5.7%, 5.5 attempts (3 pointers)
- Bam Adebayo: -6.0%, 5.3 attempts (< 6 feet); -5.4%, 8.6 attempts (all 2 pointers); -0.8%, 4.9 attempts (3 pointers)
).
- a linguistic indulgence in referring to queridiculo's claim that Turner's rebounding was so bad that it would simply undo any other impact he had on the floor. That said, I do want to make sure we're clear on how rebounding rate stats can be used. DRB% describes the percentage of all available defensive rebounds which a player collects during the minutes they play. Being normalized to a fixed number of possessions, it's independent of player minutes; it also has no relationship to total rebounding opportunities (i.e. in being based on a fixed number of possessions, it also normalizes for pace).
) resulted in only 9.0 TRB per 36 for Turner. All of which is to say that Indiana's 