tarantism wrote:That's another way of looking at the graph I hadn't considered. It does track better when I think of it that way.
Your first statement is how I feel and where I get hung up. I don't mind using catch all defensive +/- metrics for five man units. But parsing it out individually doesn't tell the whole story for me. When it comes to modern NBA defense the devil is in the details and without access to expensive tracking data we can possibly glean enough to tell the whole story and accurately rate a player.
But I digress. Not trying to derail the thread. I just see stats like DARKO thrown around as if they're definitive more often than I'd like - not that EvanZ was necessarily doing that.
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I look at metrics like they are clues to a crime.. they can really help understand the past and piece it together, but the details have to be filled in with old-fashioned legwork. And like clues in a crime, they *could* point to future information/understanding, but very frequently don't unless the context/situation is the same
FWIW, I dont think people need access to all kinds of data to evaluate defense.. re-watching key plays, especially off-ball plays that usually influence the result most, is the biggest thing I've learned in the past few years. Offensively too, actually. Fans too often look at results and walk it back from there, but the root causes are frequently overlooked. The Warriors brass has done an excellent job at finding people who are great at being root causes of good plays, with Looney/GP2/Wiggins being the more recent examples. Moody is knocking on the door of that, and Podz looks like he could be one of those guys too. Maybe even TJD? We'll see but assuming good health, we're going to have a lot of smart and unselfish players on the team