Yes but from the link I've provided, blazers hold more 1sts in the defensive categories. They are no worse than 2nd in each one. GS are third in some of these defensive categories
According to this website we have the 2nd best defense. http://nyloncalculus.com/stats/league-efficiency-pace-summary-stats-2014-2015 PPG is not a reliable measure of defense because of pace. Points per possession is the way to go to measure offensive or defensive efficiency, but you have to make sure "possession" means major possession, not minor possession. If you have the ball, miss a shot, get the rebound, and score, that was one major possession but two minor possessions. You want to use major possessions when measuring team efficiency. To illustrate why, suppose a team holds opponents to 30% shooting but can't get a defensive rebound at all. Defensive efficiency per minor possession will be great because of the low FG% but defensive efficiency per major possession will be terrible because they can't get a defensive rebound. Obviously, the latter measure is the correct one, because in fact they can't stop the opponent from scoring. Most websites that have "points per possession" don't tell you if that means major or minor possessions. The website I linked above doesn't tell you either, but because each teams offensive and defensive possessions are almost identical, I'm pretty sure those are major possessions. In a given game, offensive and defensive major possessions alternate, so they are identical except for when a team possessed the ball at both start and end of quarter.
Good points! OppFG% is still my preferred measure for defense because it takes out the FTs that are shot at the end of close games when one team purposely puts the other at the line trying trade 2 points for 3 and stop the clock. All it measures is a team's ability to force misses by the opposing team. PPG is a very overrated and sometimes misleading stat.
http://espn.go.com/nba/statistics/team/_/stat/team-comparison-per-game/sort/fieldGoalPctOpponent And we are 2nd in that as well. It really is shocking in how much our defense has improved. And deceiving, I wonder how many other teams or beat riders know that until they look at the stats
That's a good point about FT's in close games. Those should somehow be taken out. But using only Opp FG% misses many important factors: - a team may give up lots of 3's. lower fg% but higher efg% - a team may foul too much in the process of holding opp fg% down - a team may cause lots of turnovers - a team may have great or terrible defensive rebounding
All good points, again. And perfectly illustrates that no single stat can be used to fully explain how well/poorly a team/player performs. Still, when doing a quick & dirty review my first stop is OppFG%, followed by OppeFG%, and then if I want more info I start looking into FTA, Rebounding, Points in Paint, etc.
Yes, it's really amazing, especially when you look at our individual players and where we were just a year ago. Individually our players seem mostly not great defenders. Dame has improved drastically from last year, but I attribute our success to playing defense as a team.
Okay so here is the update after the Laker game... 1.) Portland: 1st in Opponent's PPG @ 96.4 - GS: is 11th @ 98.2 = 2.2 better 2.) Portland: 2nd in Opponent's Average Scoring Margin @ -.7.4 - GS: is 1st @ -11.0 = 2.6 worse I will edit
It's interesting that both teams (POR and GSW) didn't really lose much ground defensively when their starting centers went down. Losing Bogut hurt GSW's defense more than losing Rolo hurt ours, but Bogut is back now and they're easing him back into the lineup. Right now, GSW has Andrew Bogut, David Lee and Andre Iguodala coming off their bench. That's just sick. I suspect that once Bogut is back in shape, hell be starting and Speights will be back to the bench. Bogut gives them much better defense, and passing, with the starters and Speights gives them a great scorer off the bench with the second unit. GSW has better 1-on-1 defenders in Bogut, Green and Iguodala, but I like Stotts' system as it doesn't rely on great individual defenders and lets us weather injuries better. BNM
