Couple of charts that are hard to copy and full article is interesting. Don't know what to make of it, defensive stats are hard to produce.

The NBA’s player tracking statistics have allowed to ask and answer all sorts of new questions over the past few seasons. However, most of the data has an offensive focus. This is not a complaint — defense is mostly about the absence of action which necessarily makes it hard to track. With some elbow grease, it is possible to contort some parts of the offensive offerings into a defensive data set.

Earlier this year, with the help of Darryl Blackport, I was able to work backwards with the public offensive drive statistics, connecting them with the defensive team on a game-by-game basis. This allows the aggregation of defensive drive statistics. That first attempt was back in November and I’ve finally had a chance to repeat the process for the entire season. The table below shows the same per game drive statistics the NBA shares, but these are defensive, reflecting drives allowed.

Other than wasted salary per player...

Bonn1997 wrote:

jrodmc wrote:Can't seem to put too much stock in a chart that shows Sactown ahead of the Spurs in anything.

Other than wasted salary per player...

It's surprising but that doesn't mean it's wrong. It's just a recording of how many points per drive attempt the team gave up. It can't be wrong unless the people entering the data typed the wrong numbers in or the people watching the footage have bad vision or some other ridiculous human error occurred.

well said. Defensive stats suck these days. Gotta guess there are probably 10-20 different types of defensive stats that would go into forming or informing the defensive efficiency stat itself: defensive rebounds, steals, deflections, 3pt FG %, drives, etc. This is just 1 super tiny slice.

Knicks are up there too cause of Rolo, KP. Cousins, Stein, Koufos would deter some drivers. Could be a factor of team giving up easy 3pt or perimeter shooting too.