SoTD: Bargnani's defensive numbers over 4 years

[Tony_Montana]

I have no idea as to why even the few stat-worshippers are attracted to basketball.

Cause it's 2010. NBA Basketball is moving towards a statistical revolution. Get hip to it.

[andreafan]

I found a stat on bargnani, he farts on average 4 times a game and betches 1.6 times a game.

[MrBojangelz71]

In other words, you need to actually UNDERSTAND what the stat you are using means, when you use it in an argument? Yes, generally in life if you don't understand what you are talking about, you'll get in trouble (for example, ZefSyde earlier in this thread complaining about how pace inflates ORTG or DRTG.)

However, if you DO understand how to interpret stats (in particular, understanding how they are calculated and thus what they capture and do not) such as PER and Drtg, then feel free to use them.

Or as most on here do, interpret the stat in a fashion that supports your cause while dismissing factors of it that hurt your cause.

[ItsDanger]

As someone with an extensive statisitcal background especially in my line of work, these kind of stats are not to be taken as gospel. You can learn something from them but they do not offer any definitive answers. yes Bargs has not been great defensively. But there are other variables that are not considered in these calcs. I would venture to say that it is impossible to accurately measure given that there are 4 other players, opposing players, coaching instructions, etc.

[andreafan]

As someone with an extensive statisitcal background especially in my line of work, these kind of stats are not to be taken as gospel. You can learn something from them but they do not offer any definitive answers. yes Bargs has not been great defensively. But there are other variables that are not considered in these calcs. I would venture to say that it is impossible to accurately measure given that there are 4 other players, opposing players, coaching instructions, etc.

True but the op is steadfast in using stats to blame all on andrea. He just dismisses andrea fans as lunatics and any counter arguments are of little relevance.Sad actually.

[andreafan]

Btw i am a raptor fan first, and an andrea fan second.

[BorisDK1]

I'm sorry to weigh in on such a controversial topic for my first post here, but I find much of the argumentation here overly facile. The people blindly insisting Bargnani's defense is somehow acceptable are oblivious to the fact that he just played over 2,800 minutes for what is the 21st worst defense in league history - well, since 1978 when we first had the requisite data, at any rate (measured by points allowed / 100 possessions worse than league average) so obviously he has to be lacking something.

On the other hand, the discussion of primary cause of the defense from the OP and others is equally facile. I find using on/off court data as indicators of cause to be fallacious (post hoc, ergo propter hoc) and further, probably not using the best data available. I believe the best data available is through a method called Project Defensive Score Sheet (spelled out in Dean Oliver's Basketball on Paper), in which all the stops produced and scores allowed are tabulated for all the players (and uncontested action as well) and the individual Defensive Rating generated from that is the best way of generating defensive metrics. That data is not currently kept in boxscores by the NBA, so that data has to be kept manually. I did that for this past year - every single possession, all 82 games.

This past year, Bargnani played ~ 2800 minutes. In those minutes, he forced 553.5 missed field goal attempts (not including blocks), 75.5 turnovers (not including steals) and 64 missed free throws, to go along with his 389 defensive rebounds, 111 blocks and 25 steals. He allowed 404 field goals and 188 made free throws to go along with those. That translates to a stop% of .552 while facing 19.2% of the opponents' possessions defensively, giving him an ultimate Defensive Rating of 110.0 points allowed / 100 possessions faced, which was second-best of anybody on our team playing more than 350 minutes, behind only Amir Johnson (.551 stop% @ 22.8% DPoss%, 109.5 DRat) and tied with Bosh (.545 stop% @ 19.5% DPoss%, 110.0 DRat). (All the team defensive numbers used to generate the DRat only come from the games in which the individual actually play.) Now, that's a far cry from being the hapless yutz that some want to present him as. To be sure, you would hope your center is better than that - and certainly facing more possessions. But it's far better than some want to portray.

Who was the worst on our team? Jose. He had a stop% of .376 @ 18.8% DPoss%, 118.3 DRat. To put that in some context, uncontested action (i.e. uncaused action, being guarded by thin air) had a stop% of .357 @ 7.9% DPoss%, 115.2 DRat. Further, when Jose missed time, the team became significantly better, to the tune of about 4 points / 100 possessions. When Andrea missed his two games (granted, a tiny sample size) the team actually played at around the same level defensively it normally did. Why didn't it get considerably better, if Andrea were the cause of the defensive badness by himself?

I think the answer is significantly more complex than "blame Andrea". I think the people who want to do that, unfortunately, are using guesswork generated by on/off court analysis from 82games.com instead of direct analysis. I suppose that's becasue there is a dearth of popularly published data for defensive metrics, and because many people struggle with defensive analysis. This tends to be expressed by assigning the vast majority of blame/credit for defensive performance to the big men, which I personally believe is an extremely naive view of defense. And then we have the blaming of Triano's defensive tactical beliefs for the team's defensive woes, which further is untenable.

I think the problems lay in having so many players (Andrea, Hedo, Jose) on the court who are at considerable disadvantage of speed and quickness, and consequently the team had absolutely no pressure on the basketball at any time. Pressure on the ball is the absolute foundation of your defense, and without it nothing you try will work.

EDIT: Another thing I forgot to mention...the on/off court data had considerable flux as the season fell apart for this team. Jose was somewhere around +12 points allowed/100 possessions after he got hurt, and that improved somewhat as he came off the bench. Andrea was a slight plus or a neutral factor for most of the year until the team totally collapsed after the All-Star break. This adds a lot of doubt to using on/off court data to explain cause, because the data did fluctuate so much. There's much better information to use that gives direct data, not indirect.

[hsb]

Either way this team will stink until someone emerges as the new VC/Bosh.

The team stunk with those two guys too. Have to leave the preputual loop of finding that one marketable guy and generate a winning team from now on.

[Tony_Montana]

lol @ keeping that data for every game this season. do you mind posting yer game log spreadsheet?

[BorisDK1]

lol @ keeping that data for every game this season. do you mind posting yer game log spreadsheet?

You can download the final spreadsheet here in .pdf format. I don't have the spreadsheet available online yet, as it is a huge file with splits sorted in other workbooks. I'd be happy to post that this week sometime, if you'd like.

One caveat: there are editing mistakes in the team stats in the final page of the document, there, and haven't had a chance to correct them. I did post every single game's stats at raptorspace.com, if you have any doubts. My username there is BorisD.

Nice try with the "lol", though. lol @ u? I'm too old for the childish "pic or didn't happen" thing.

[Indeed]

These stats are totally meaningless. Its like a good d-man in hockey with a -10 rating on an average team.

Hrm, I don't know much about hockey, but isn't it usually a low scoring game? It would be stupid to look at on/off, +/- sort of stats in say a game like soccer...there is too much statistical variance and not enough data to wash it away.

The wonderful thing about basketball is that there is a GINORMOUS amount of data, since each game is usually 90+ possessions. Think about it, that is roughly 7400 possession per season for a team. That is a crapload of data...you can learn a lot from it if you try.

I don't think you can simply minus both On/Off
DRtg = Points Allowed * 100 / Possessions:
DRtgDiff = [Points Allowed On] * 100 / [Possessions On] - [Points Allowed Off] * 100 / [Possessions Off]

You need to know the Possessions (Pace) correctly in order to do a minus.
[Edit: Sorry, I mean you can minus them, but if your base possessions are different, then it means their strategy has changed, thus the minus becomes less meaningful. Rather, knowing the sample size of base possessions and the reason it changed would be a more in depth understanding then just knowing a change in number.]

Besides, Points Allowed is simply +/-, it looks better when it is in an average, but to determine how much point opponent can score doesn't lead to how good/bad he is as a defender, but as a team (hint: Bargnani is a really bad help defender).

[supersub15]

I'm sorry to weigh in on such a controversial topic for my first post here, but I find much of the argumentation here overly facile. The people blindly insisting Bargnani's defense is somehow acceptable are oblivious to the fact that he just played over 2,800 minutes for what is the 21st worst defense in league history - well, since 1978 when we first had the requisite data, at any rate (measured by points allowed / 100 possessions worse than league average) so obviously he has to be lacking something.

On the other hand, the discussion of primary cause of the defense from the OP and others is equally facile. I find using on/off court data as indicators of cause to be fallacious (post hoc, ergo propter hoc) and further, probably not using the best data available. I believe the best data available is through a method called Project Defensive Score Sheet (spelled out in Dean Oliver's Basketball on Paper), in which all the stops produced and scores allowed are tabulated for all the players (and uncontested action as well) and the individual Defensive Rating generated from that is the best way of generating defensive metrics. That data is not currently kept in boxscores by the NBA, so that data has to be kept manually. I did that for this past year - every single possession, all 82 games.

This past year, Bargnani played ~ 2800 minutes. In those minutes, he forced 553.5 missed field goal attempts (not including blocks), 75.5 turnovers (not including steals) and 64 missed free throws, to go along with his 389 defensive rebounds, 111 blocks and 25 steals. He allowed 404 field goals and 188 made free throws to go along with those. That translates to a stop% of .552 while facing 19.2% of the opponents' possessions defensively, giving him an ultimate Defensive Rating of 110.0 points allowed / 100 possessions faced, which was second-best of anybody on our team playing more than 350 minutes, behind only Amir Johnson (.551 stop% @ 22.8% DPoss%, 109.5 DRat) and tied with Bosh (.545 stop% @ 19.5% DPoss%, 110.0 DRat). (All the team defensive numbers used to generate the DRat only come from the games in which the individual actually play.) Now, that's a far cry from being the hapless yutz that some want to present him as. To be sure, you would hope your center is better than that - and certainly facing more possessions. But it's far better than some want to portray.

Who was the worst on our team? Jose. He had a stop% of .376 @ 18.8% DPoss%, 118.3 DRat. To put that in some context, uncontested action (i.e. uncaused action, being guarded by thin air) had a stop% of .357 @ 7.9% DPoss%, 115.2 DRat. Further, when Jose missed time, the team became significantly better, to the tune of about 4 points / 100 possessions. When Andrea missed his two games (granted, a tiny sample size) the team actually played at around the same level defensively it normally did. Why didn't it get considerably better, if Andrea were the cause of the defensive badness by himself?

I think the answer is significantly more complex than "blame Andrea". I think the people who want to do that, unfortunately, are using guesswork generated by on/off court analysis from 82games.com instead of direct analysis. I suppose that's becasue there is a dearth of popularly published data for defensive metrics, and because many people struggle with defensive analysis. This tends to be expressed by assigning the vast majority of blame/credit for defensive performance to the big men, which I personally believe is an extremely naive view of defense. And then we have the blaming of Triano's defensive tactical beliefs for the team's defensive woes, which further is untenable.

I think the problems lay in having so many players (Andrea, Hedo, Jose) on the court who are at considerable disadvantage of speed and quickness, and consequently the team had absolutely no pressure on the basketball at any time. Pressure on the ball is the absolute foundation of your defense, and without it nothing you try will work.

EDIT: Another thing I forgot to mention...the on/off court data had considerable flux as the season fell apart for this team. Jose was somewhere around +12 points allowed/100 possessions after he got hurt, and that improved somewhat as he came off the bench. Andrea was a slight plus or a neutral factor for most of the year until the team totally collapsed after the All-Star break. This adds a lot of doubt to using on/off court data to explain cause, because the data did fluctuate so much. There's much better information to use that gives direct data, not indirect.

Hey Boris. Good to see you on the RealGM board.

I do know that you did track the games, but I do have some reservations with your method.

1. Not sure how many of you were tracking the numbers, but Synergy Sports, with all of its army of game trackers could not track all of the possessions, or did track them but could not assign blame or credit. So, I'm not sure how you alone, or with some friends, could be so definitive in your analysis.
2. I haven't checked PDSS in a long time, but I'm not sure it tracks absent/late help defence.
3. ON/OFF DRTG might not be the best indicator with small sample sizes, but I am using 4000+ minutes worth of data and even bigger number of possessions. And all point to one conclusion: the minute Bargnani steps on the floor, team defence goes to hell, by an 8+ points margin.

You have called the analysis facile, but I would like you to explain how
Bargnani + another big = 113 DRTG
Bosh + another big (not Bargnani) = 104 DRTG

Same teammates, same system, and with 4000+ minutes worth of data, about the same opposition.

We need to go out for a beer with Adam...

[Tony_Montana]

So it's a composite defensive stat that includes man and team defense? The Synergy Stats already showed that Bargnani is a decent man defender. The whole point of this thread is to showcase how awful we are as a team defending when Bargnani is playing.

[BorisDK1]

Hey Boris. Good to see you on the RealGM board.

I do know that you did track the games, but I do have some reservations with your method.

1. Not sure how many of you were tracking the numbers, but Synergy Sports, with all of its army of game trackers could not track all of the possessions, or did track them but could not assign blame or credit. So, I'm not sure how you alone, or with some friends, could be so definitive in your analysis.
2. ON/OFF DRTG might not be the best indicator with small sample sizes, but I am using 4000+ minutes worth of data and even bigger number of possessions. And all point to one conclusion: the minute Bargnani steps on the floor, team defence goes to hell, by an 8+ points margin.

You have called the analysis facile, but I would like you to explain how
Bargnani + another big = 113 DRTG
Bosh + another big (not Bargnani) = 104 DRTG

Same teammates, same system, and with 4000+ minutes worth of data, about the same opposition.

We need to go out for a beer with Adam...

I'd love to get together with Adam and you for a beer with Adam! Name the time, I'll make my place available. Adam's over here at least once per week anyway.

I think Synergy Sports may have been at a substantial disadvantage to yours truly. They had to look at every team in every game with only a finite staff working from video. I had one team to analyze (I didn't analyze opponents) and I had the benefit of 1) no deadlines, 2) PVR. It wasn't that hard. The team I'm coaching is using that method. And yes, sometimes blame or credit is tough to do (about 8% of the team's possessions couldn't be individually assigned this year), but it's not quite the Gordian Knot that I'm sure it's tempting to believe it is. And, not to sound conceited, but as a coach I've spenet a lot of time thinking and reading and working with various defensive situations. I feel fairly confident in my ability to analyze a variety of defensive scenarios.

As for on/off court data, it doesn't really tell you why something happens when somebody steps foot on or off. It doesn't communicate direct data. It communicates something and should be welcomed as such, but to try to explain all cause from it I do think is venturing into post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy. It certainlly communicates that Andrea certainly isn't making the defense good, but at the same time is he doing so directly or was he uniquely assigned to play with an imbalanced unit that focused entirely on offense in terms of skillset? On/off court data leaves you at a loss for the explanation. I feel pretty confident with a general analysis that Andrea won't make a defense good, but I think he's good enough at certain things to prevent us from saying that he's the primary cause of our problems.

Again, I also have to wonder why our defense didn't get that much better in the games where he didn't play at all? That's a predictable outcome if he were the cause of our badness, no? But our defense did look about average when Jose was hurt and not playing at all. I know that doesn't prove anything, but it's certainly an unexpected result if Andrea were so causal in our bad defense, I think you'd agree.

[BorisDK1]

So it's a composite defensive stat that includes man and team defense? The Synergy Stats already showed that Bargnani is a decent man defender. The whole point of this thread is to showcase how awful we are as a team defending when Bargnani is playing.

Project Defensive Score Sheet tabulates all individual defensive performance, as well as uncontested action. The team's performance is included into the final analysis in the DRat formula:

DRat = TeamDRat + %DPoss x (100 x (Opponent Points / Scoring Possession) x (1 - Stop%) - TeamDRat)

[dagger]

Man

Boris versus Supersub = The Stathead Cage Match

This is going to get interesting.

[supersub15]

Hey Boris. Good to see you on the RealGM board.

I do know that you did track the games, but I do have some reservations with your method.

1. Not sure how many of you were tracking the numbers, but Synergy Sports, with all of its army of game trackers could not track all of the possessions, or did track them but could not assign blame or credit. So, I'm not sure how you alone, or with some friends, could be so definitive in your analysis.
2. ON/OFF DRTG might not be the best indicator with small sample sizes, but I am using 4000+ minutes worth of data and even bigger number of possessions. And all point to one conclusion: the minute Bargnani steps on the floor, team defence goes to hell, by an 8+ points margin.

You have called the analysis facile, but I would like you to explain how
Bargnani + another big = 113 DRTG
Bosh + another big (not Bargnani) = 104 DRTG

Same teammates, same system, and with 4000+ minutes worth of data, about the same opposition.

We need to go out for a beer with Adam...

I'd love to get together with Adam and you for a beer with Adam! Name the time, I'll make my place available. Adam's over here at least once per week anyway.

I think Synergy Sports may have been at a substantial disadvantage to yours truly. They had to look at every team in every game with only a finite staff working from video. I had one team to analyze (I didn't analyze opponents) and I had the benefit of 1) no deadlines, 2) PVR. It wasn't that hard. The team I'm coaching is using that method. And yes, sometimes blame or credit is tough to do (about 8% of the team's possessions couldn't be individually assigned this year), but it's not quite the Gordian Knot that I'm sure it's tempting to believe it is. And, not to sound conceited, but as a coach I've spenet a lot of time thinking and reading and working with various defensive situations. I feel fairly confident in my ability to analyze a variety of defensive scenarios.

As for on/off court data, it doesn't really tell you why something happens when somebody steps foot on or off. It doesn't communicate direct data. It communicates something and should be welcomed as such, but to try to explain all cause from it I do think is venturing into post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy. It certainlly communicates that Andrea certainly isn't making the defense good, but at the same time is he doing so directly or was he uniquely assigned to play with an imbalanced unit that focused entirely on offense in terms of skillset? On/off court data leaves you at a loss for the explanation. I feel pretty confident with a general analysis that Andrea won't make a defense good, but I think he's good enough at certain things to prevent us from saying that he's the primary cause of our problems.

Again, I also have to wonder why our defense didn't get that much better in the games where he didn't play at all? That's a predictable outcome if he were the cause of our badness, no? But our defense did look about average when Jose was hurt and not playing at all. I know that doesn't prove anything, but it's certainly an unexpected result if Andrea were so causal in our bad defense, I think you'd agree.

Sure, for the beer, I'll email Adam when I am in the Burlington vicinity... Should be good!

I don't dispute that you've been diligent with your work, but I'll keep it as a reservation for now, because of eye (things can happen quickly, and as you said some of the possessions were not logged), prejudice, system (how do you know what Triano wants?), etc.

I'll bite on the Jose theory:
Team DRTG for the combo - Calderon / Bosh / another big (NO BARGNANI): 104.67
Team DRTG for the combo - Calderon / Bargnani / another big: 113.72

Your turn.

[ratul]

Our defense is awful, and our chemistry is not great with bargs - he might be better as a four but who knows - the fact is he and calderon are a liability on defense.

[Hendrix]

Hey, Welcome Boris D.

[Crazy-Canuck]

lol @ keeping that data for every game this season. do you mind posting yer game log spreadsheet?

You can download the final spreadsheet here in .pdf format. I don't have the spreadsheet available online yet, as it is a huge file with splits sorted in other workbooks. I'd be happy to post that this week sometime, if you'd like.

One caveat: there are editing mistakes in the team stats in the final page of the document, there, and haven't had a chance to correct them. I did post every single game's stats at raptorspace.com, if you have any doubts. My username there is BorisD.

Nice try with the "lol", though. lol @ u? I'm too old for the childish "pic or didn't happen" thing.

Welcome to the board and FYI, any stats that support Bargs do come with consequences here.