ComboGuardCity wrote:Not to discount Lillard, but Holiday is an excellent defender as well.
it's interesting. I've seen just about every game Lillard has played, and while I agree he needs to work on his defense, I think his defensive weaknesses have become overstated
I've also noticed Holiday in the few games I've seen Philly play the last couple of seasons. I'd tend to agree he seems to have an impact defensively in that he seems disruptive to other team's offenses. He has good lateral quickness and good length for a PG
but when you compare Lillard and Holiday in some of the supposed defensive stats out there, the result isn't what you expect -
82 games tracks player/opponent numbers in several categories. Here are some number that each player is giving up to an opponent:
eFG%: Holiday .492....Lillard .458
FTA/48: Holiday 3.8....Lillard 4.1
Ast/48: Holiday 9.2....Lillard 9.1
Turnover/48: Holiday 3.7....Lillard 3.0
Pts/48: Holiday 20.5....Lillard 18.7
PER%: Holiday 16.4....Lillard 14.3
Lillard actually holds his opponent to lower scoring efficiency, while Holiday forces more turnovers and allows slightly fewer FT attempts. That kind of matches my impression of Holiday's length being a disruptive force on defense
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Synergy also tracks a ton of data. Almost all is behind a pay-wall but you can see some numbers here:
http://mysynergysports.com/
(it's an interactive website and aparently has lots of Java working in the background so tables load slowly, at least for me)
anyway, they track opponent points/possession for individual players and where that ranks among all NBA players
Lillard gives up 0.84 points/possession overall which ranks 131st among NBA players
Holiday gives up 0.89 points/possession overall which ranks 236th among NBA players
Now, in isolation, Holiday allows 0.86 points/possession while Lillard allows 0.99. Big edge to Holiday there, and my guess is his experience and length are big advantages here. But seeing as how isolation plays only account for around 14% of total plays, that edge for Holiday is obviously not determinative.
On the other hand, in P&R, Lillard gives up 0.79 points/possession compared to Holiday at 0.82. Since P&R accounts for around 45% of all plays, this gives Lillard a substantial statistical boost
Lillard's other big advantage is in spot-up which accounts for around 25-30% of plays. He gives up 0.82 points/possession compare to Holiday at 0.95
all-in-all, the Synergy numbers seem to track the numbers from 82games. That would include the forced turnover numbers as Holiday forces turnovers on 14.8% of possessions while Lillard forces turnovers 10.5% of the time
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some other more general numbers seem to give Holiday an edge. The team on-court/off-court marks at 82games show Philly is better defensively with Holiday on court while Portland is not better with Lillard on court. BB Reference gives Holiday a much better individual defensive rating then Lillard, but both players have worse ratings then their teams, and I've seen a ton of aberrations with those ratings
I wonder if Holiday isn't relying on his athleticism a lot more defensively then Lillard is. That would carry his defense in isolation but not so much in P&R and other plays. Maybe Lillard is sounder fundamentally because of 4 years in college, and fundamentals simply trump athleticism when it comes to defense
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