I like this way of representing offense and defense of various teams. I calculated standardized offensive and defensive ratings (the more positive, the better) using the schedule-adjusted efficiency numbers at basketball-geek. A few observations: The Celtics are amazing right now -- dominant defense, with a still very potent offense. The Pistons and Hornets, interestingly enough, rate identically on both ends. Larry Brown has his Bobcats playing stellar defense, though the offense is lagging. Defensive numbers for the Lakers are very strong, though strangely they haven't excelled yet on the offensive end. Could the struggles of Lamar Odom be the reason? The Raptors defense is god-awful. The Spurs have become a strong offensive team, and so-so defensive team. They've had slow starts defensive in the past as well, so I wouldn't be surprised if they start to turn it on in the second half of the season.
The Lakers are: bottom 10 in 3-point shooting "top" 10 in turnovers committed per possession bottom 10 in free throws made per shot attempt Couple that with the Lakers playing mostly home games, and by this analysis their offense has been slightly-above mediocre. Its on the defensive end that they've shined.
This graph doesnt pass my "common sense" test Memphis and Rockets(just a few i disagree with) with better overall O than the Lakers....uh no
15th in offensive eff http://insider.espn.go.com/nba/holl...teamstats?sort=offeff&seasonType=2&league=nba 18th in ts%, 15th in eff fg%, and so on.
memphis is ahead in offensive eff, houston percentage points behind them, not sure how current this chart is.
Does the Lakers being a bad 3-point shooting team, a bad turnover team, and bad at capitalizing at the free throw line pass your common sense test? Because those are just the facts. They'll surely get better. But this represents the performance so far.
Why, you think Houston is supposed to be a better offensive team? The gap between the two squads lies on the defensive end, where the Rockets are pretty good while the Grizzlies are fairly bad.
eh? i was agreeing with your silly chart on the offensive end compared to the lakers, when cross referencing it to the latest offensive eff stats. maybe i could have made that a little clearer.
"I calculated standardized offensive and defensive ratings (the more positive, the better) using the schedule-adjusted efficiency numbers at basketball-geek. " That might explain whatever discrepancy you're referring to. The efficiency numbers I used are listed at the link in the first post.
Here's another variant, but I rotated the points 45 degrees clockwise, and then flipped it across the X-axis. The end result is a plot which rates teams overall going east to west. And teams towards the north are offense-oriented (i.e., rate better offensively than defensively), while teams towards the south are defense-oriented.
