Am I Missing Something: the Defensive Rating Statistic

Rod700 · Post #1 » by **Rod700** » Fri Jul 20, 2012 9:16 pm

All, in all the list has a lot of the best defensive players at the top IMO, but I have to be missing something. Boozer is on the list, and I wonder if he benefited from playing alongside Noah and Asik. Does anyone know more about how this statistic is calculated than what I have in the paragraph (and duplicatively in the 2nd link) below? Also, I should mention that I was looking the active players in the first link. I'm assuming that is just their rating for the 2011-12 season. I appreciate in greater incite you can provide to this stat. Thanks guys!

http://www.basketball-reference.com/lea ... ctive.html

DRtg
Defensive Rating (available since the 1977-78 season in the NBA); for players and teams it is points allowed per 100 posessions. This rating was developed by Dean Oliver, author of Basketball on Paper. I will point you to Dean's book for complete details.

Link for the definition above:
http://www.basketball-reference.com/about/glossary.html

Rod700 · Post #2 » by **Rod700** » Fri Jul 20, 2012 9:26 pm

Ok. Now I see Bonzi Wells is on the list and he has been retired for a while. Now I'm just more confused as to how to view the leaders for last season. Help!

mysticbb · Post #3 » by **mysticbb** » Sat Jul 21, 2012 7:47 am

Yeah, boxscore based individual defensive stats are not good. Boozer gets a high rating (well, low DRTG), because he gets a lot of defensive rebounds on a great defensive team. I tried to minimize those effects in my boxscore based stats, but Boozer still comes out 4th behind Howard, Garnett and Josh Smith. And while those 3 are also showing big defensive impact in non-boxscore stats like defensive RAPM, Boozer does not. We can't do anything about that until we can better defensive stats. Including some sort of help factor, charges, deflections, missed rotations, etc. into the boxscore would really improve the stats here.

Until then take the defensive values derived from boxscore stats with a big grain of salt. Oliver's DRtg can at best describe the variance in defense by 50%. My stats is a bit better, but still off by a couple of players. Especially bad help defenders with good boxscore values in blocked shots, steals and defensive rebounds or really good defenders without such boxscore entries are just wrongly assigned with good respective bad values.

Rod700 · Post #4 » by **Rod700** » Mon Jul 23, 2012 8:17 pm

Thanks. Do you have your stat posted somewhere I could have access to it?