I see the effort but the other teams still make their shots off the rebound. All the stats are fine but I would like to see stats for offensive conversion from a blocked shot and impact towards the game..
defense gave up a def rating of 119.5 last night, which is 3.5 points worse than their season average of 116.0; which is 29th and the 3rd worst in NBA history, IIRC. Other than that, 'defense improving'
Out of curiosity, are defensive ratings slipping for other teams as the season progresses? I.e., are offenses getting better after the short off-season and choppy start?
I can't say for sure; I don't think so. The median D rating right now is 112.4 and IIRC, that's about what it was 3 months ago. I'm not sure where you'd find those numbers but I'm sure they are somewhere. Maybe behind a paywall
This is far from definitive, but a quick search just now turned up this for Dec and overall: https://www.statmuse.com/nba/ask/defensive-rating-nba-teams https://www.statmuse.com/nba/ask/nba-teams-defensive-rating-by-month The Dec average is 110.3 and the current average is 112.3 (I dumped them into a spreadsheet to save time), so there is slippage relative to the small Dec sample size. A Jan/Feb comparison might shed more light on that. If that is accurate, then Portland improving slightly in D-rating is actually a 2-3 point improvement relative to the league trend. Big if, though.
Since Nurk's return, the Blazers have a defensive rating of 113.7 (17th in the league / 0.5pts below league avg.) in non-garbage time minutes per Cleaning the Glass. And the player 2nd in defensive rating during that span (per NBA.com) behind Nurkic (107.1) is..... Anfernee Simons (107.9)
yeah, I'm not putting any stock in the 3-5 game sample sizes that early in the season. I'd say you need to have played 25-30 games to have a decent statistical sample if you credit that website with accuracy, Portland's rating by month: December 118.2 (4 games) January 115.2 (14 games) February 118.2 (14 games) March 119.4 (15 games) April 114.1 (16 games) no result for May if you go backwards from the game against Phoenix, the ratings in May: Suns 119.5 Jazz 110.2 Rocket 126.0 (yikes!!) Spurs 102.8 Lakers 102.4 Cavs 105.9 Hawks 125.3 (yikes!!) Celtics 117.5 really good ratings against offensively challenged teams. Not good ratings against good offenses
