BorisDK1 wrote:They are very noisy, in that you can't tell who's responsible for what, against whom, or for how much of what. You don't know, 82games.com doesn't know. So when you try to take on/off court data and hang entire responsibility/credit for that gap in one player (when, in fact, you're measuring a bunch of different sets of players - some of which do not include the player in discussion at all) solely on that one player, there's a bunch of noise.
No, sadly, Ripp hasn't shown deficiencies in anything. He's thrown out a hermeneutic of suspicion he won't apply to his own preferred stats, and made a bunch of basic mistakes of fact and shown some inability to read for comprehension along the way.
Firstly, always nice to be met with some misrepresentation.I never said Jose Calderon was the root of all defensive evil: I said he's the primary cause of our defensive badness with Andrea being a secondary cause, helped along by the fact that the team violated the John Wooden Rule and put itself in situation where it had three players (Bargnani, Turkoglu and Calderon) in the starting lineup almost always at a massive disadvantage for speed and quickness, and often four (DeRozan). Contrary to popular opinion, I do not think this is the only metric one can use to evaluate defense: it is the most transparent, most direct, and actually based on direct analysis, not guesswork. Further, I haven't had any interact with the fact that this metric fluctuated so much for all players depending upon whether Jose was hurt, starting or coming off the bench, and for a good portion of the season Bargnani was either a neutral or slightly positive presence...on/off court data cannot speak to the righthood or wronghood of that thesis.
See, you're guessing that a "rotating big met" another beater of Jose when Bargnani wasn't playing, but do you know that? No. Your problem is that you're abandoning basketball analysis and relying on an indirect counting to give you the answer. I have no problem with on/off court data, used in its proper limited fashion - and in Bargnani's case is indicative of something
I said they had the second-best defensive ratings. I don't think a DRat for post players of 110.0 is really acceptable at all. Bosh was surprisingly weak at times this year, and Bargnani as we all know doesn't rebound the ball well enough defensively or help in dribble drive action as well as we'd hope. (He does do some things in help defense quite well, though - which people here are missing, because they'd rather look at a series of results posted on a website than the basketball floor.)
As to your question, who else is on the floor with them? That has an effect. Defense isn't a three-man game. Who's on the court against them? You don't know. 82games.com doesn't know. And the causal argument weakens under that lack of data.
They don't jive with limited results you want to look at to the exclusion of direct data, you mean.That doesn't bother me a whole lot.
Yeah, I'm having fun with this and I hope people who disagree with me are! I respect people on this board, even if I find the misrepresentation at times a tad egregious. I know you've had to learn to be stubborn because of the resistance you got here to introducing these kinds of data to the board, and so am I because I got the same reaction doing the same thing at raptorspace.
Keep in mind, in our discussion, I'm not dismissing on/off court data or trying to vindicate Bargnani, but I am arguing the cause of our defense is much more complex than "blame Bargnani" (or even "blame Jose"). And your argumentation does end up a tad fallacious in that you are attempting to boil a complex cause down to a simple cause, and also by using post hoc, ergo propter hoc reasoning ("The defense got better when Bargnani sat down, therefore it must have been because Bargnani sat down.") That's logically fallacious and does render your argument as not being cogent.
I'll try to answer some in one place. I hate choppy quotes.
First, I am not running DRTG off of 82games.com. I am using a spreadsheet with detailed 5-man lineups vs. other 5-man lineups. Had I had the time, I would've analyzed who's playing against who and gave you some sort of strength of opponent metric, but it takes too much time, and frankly, for a message board, it's just too much to try and win an argument. Not worth it.
Second, I see what you mean by noisy, but for most of my arguments, I am using 9000+ minutes of play. That's a large enough sample size to smooth over any "noise". Over a 4-year period, Bargnani, Calderon and Bosh have played together and without each other against all kinds of opponents. Moreover, and in any case, we were being consistently destroyed last year, whether against bench players or starters. So, your argument that we don't know the opponent, while valid in most circumstances, is not valid here.
Yes, I am "guessing" that a big met the driver, but you still have not provided an explanation as to why our DRTG was 104.9 over a period of 4 years (4000+ minutes) with Jose and without Bargnani in the lineup. I have made my conclusions, but I would like to hear alternative conclusions as to why the numbers were so low without Bargnani. I know that Jose was getting beat at the point of attack whether Bargnani was there or not, but then why is our DRTG so low without Bargnani?
I am also confused by something you said. At certain points in this thread, you've said that Bargnani was a bad defender (just not an egregious one), while at some other points, you've said that he was neutral to positive. How do you balance both assertions?
As to solely blaming Bargnani, I have, at different points in this thread, said that Bargnani was not the sole cause of last year's disaster. As you've mentioned, having 4 bad defenders (Turkoglu/DeRozan/Calderon/Bargnani) on the floor together is a recipe for disaster. But, as I've shown in the OP, it's been 4 years now that the team DRTG becomes worse when Bargnani plays, whether against backups or starters. So, he's a net negative. There is no metric that can tell us by how much exactly.
