One way you might be able to measure a defensive player's effectiveness is his ability to force a player to shoot out of their comfort zone. For example, Dwayne Wade's strength is taking the ball to the rim and drawing contact. A defender who can force Wade to take jumpshots by staying in front of him is doing a good job. One way to measure this could be taking the NBA Hot Zone graphics of a player and then overlapping it with a shot chart from each game.
Kobe is the type of defender who gets motivated when he faces the elite players such as T-mac, Wade,Lebron,Ray allen,Paul pierce. Sometimes he gets relaxed when he goes against average players like Raja bell or Barbosa.
<div class="quote_poster">Rock4life Wrote</div><div class="quote_post">First off....if this is Wade vs Kobe defensivley, Kobe wins. Kobe is a better defender, how do i know? because anybody who watches to game knows that Kobe has the ability to singlehandlely shut down his opponent on most nights. That my friend, might not show up in the stat column but if you watch a Laker game you'd see the difference. Stats aren't the answer for EVERYTHING. Kobe is the night.</div> Exactly, great on the ball & off the ball defense will not show up on paper, no matter how hard you try to dig it up!! If you REALLY watch bball it is obviuos that Kobe is a better one-on-one defender. Plus to me they are different. If the game were on the line and they both had to play defense I can see wade thinking this: 'Mann. I gotta get this steal' and kobe thinking this 'just one more stop, anyway, anyhow imma get this stop' In other words, Wade gambles alot to get a steal & then he's off & running the other way, whereas Kobe just wants to either force you to take a bad shot or give it up to a teammate but he will not let you get a gamewinner on him!!
<div class="quote_poster">durvasa Wrote</div><div class="quote_post">Further, when I talk about defense I'm not simply talking about shutting down the opposing player. There's much more to defense than that.</div> No disrespect but that makes not sense to me. I thought that is what makes you a good defensive player/ or team: Your ability to shut down players/teams at critical moments.
<div class="quote_poster">kobe24girl Wrote</div><div class="quote_post">No disrespect but that makes not sense to me. I thought that is what makes you a good defensive player/ or team: Your ability to shut down players/teams at critical moments.</div> Simply shutting down your man isn't what defense is all about. You have to play helpside defense, and always be in the correct position. If you just don't let your guy catch the ball and smother him, your team will do horrible because the weakside will be WIDE open. This is what makes Ben Wallace the great defender he is. He isn the best one-on-one defender, but his helpside defense is unrivaled imo.
<div class="quote_poster">TheFreshPrince Wrote</div><div class="quote_post">Simply shutting down your man isn't what defense is all about. You have to play helpside defense, and always be in the correct position. If you just don't let your guy catch the ball and smother him, your team will do horrible because the weakside will be WIDE open. This is what makes Ben Wallace the great defender he is. He isn the best one-on-one defender, but his helpside defense is unrivaled imo.</div> Good point. I don't think there are many people who will debate that kobe is an amazing 1 on 1 defensive player when he wants to be.
<div class="quote_poster">kobe24girl Wrote</div><div class="quote_post">No disrespect but that makes not sense to me. I thought that is what makes you a good defensive player/ or team: Your ability to shut down players/teams at critical moments.</div> Ben Wallace hardly ever shuts down his man defensively, yet he's constantly a DPOY candidate or winner, just let that sink in for a while, and you'll understand.
<div class="quote_poster">og15 Wrote</div><div class="quote_post">Ben Wallace hardly ever shuts down his man defensively, yet he's constantly a DPOY candidate or winner, just let that sink in for a while, and you'll understand.</div> Ben Wallace is an overrated defender. Help side defense is a factor in defending, but the basic point in defense starts with keepin ur man in front of you. That's what anchors the weakside defense when ur teammate is able to contain his man long enuff for the weakside defender to slide over and block the shot.
<div class="quote_poster">Rock4life Wrote</div><div class="quote_post">Ben Wallace is an overrated defender. Help side defense is a factor in defending, but the basic point in defense starts with keepin ur man in front of you. That's what anchors the weakside defense when ur teammate is able to contain his man long enuff for the weakside defender to slide over and block the shot.</div> The goal of a defense is to stop the other team from scoring. That's "the basic point." Yes, containing your own man is important (particularly for perimeter defenders), but ultimately your value as a defensive player is based on how you help your team prevent the other team from scoring. To that end, players at different positions have different roles. A center's primary defensive responsibility is to protect the paint. Perimeter players need to be able to stop penetration. It's the same with offense. You don't say a player is a good offensive player simply because he scores a lot of points. What matters, ultimately, is the extent to which he helps his team score points. Steve Nash is one of the best offensive players in the league over the last 5 years, and he's never even averaged 19 points a game.
<div class="quote_poster">Rock4life Wrote</div><div class="quote_post">Ben Wallace is an overrated defender. Help side defense is a factor in defending, but the basic point in defense starts with keepin ur man in front of you. That's what anchors the weakside defense when ur teammate is able to contain his man long enuff for the weakside defender to slide over and block the shot.</div> Man to man defense does not anchor weakside defense, it's the other way around my friend. There's a reason Ben Wallace was considered a good defender before Billups and Rip, yet they became above average (Rip) to good defenders playing with Ben. Defenders usually funnell offensive playeers into the help defense, because they're reliant on it. Good perimeter defenders don't make your team have better help defenders while it works the other way. Obviously the ultimate thing is to have good defenders both ways.
I was thinking that these numbers are cool. But I thought about it. When comparing the wade to Kobe numbers, couldnt that also be looked at from the opposite angle. When Kobe is in the game the team relies more on him to play defence. When hes off the court they know that they have to be a more agressive team from the D stand point thus making the a better defencive Team when hes not on the court. I hope that made sence.
Without looking at the numbers (don't need to): Kobe is obviously the better man-to-man defender. At the same time, Wade does things defensively better than Kobe: block shots, rebound, and read passing lanes. Also, Wade is a clutch defender. Off the top of my head, here's some of the game deciding plays he made this season: Nets Game 5: steals the pass from J-Kidd to eliminate the Nets Pistons Game 1: Blocks Rip Hamilton and steals the ball from Lindsey Hunter late in the game to seal the victory Mavs Game 3: Blocks the inbound lob pass to Josh Howard from Dirk to seal the game. Mavs Game 6: Rebounded the ball very well in the last minutes and stole the mishandled pass by Erick Dampier which forced Dallas to foul.
<div class="quote_poster">michiganave17 Wrote</div><div class="quote_post">I was thinking that these numbers are cool. But I thought about it. When comparing the wade to Kobe numbers, couldnt that also be looked at from the opposite angle. When Kobe is in the game the team relies more on him to play defence. When hes off the court they know that they have to be a more agressive team from the D stand point thus making the a better defencive Team when hes not on the court. I hope that made sence.</div> I understand what you're saying, but I kind of doubt it. Great individual defense (which involves hustle, communication, aggressiveness, etc.) tends to be infectious. But you're right in that this analysis does not consider the strength of a player's teammates. It's possible that Kobe's teammates tended to be worse defensively than the players on the court when Kobe was on the bench. That's more difficult to figure out; at this point I don't know how to do that. Simply comparing points given up doesn't work, because there's a high variation in the offensive strength of opponents faced between different lineups (much more so than the variation in the defensive strength of opponents). For adjusted On/Off stats, you need to take into account both opponents faced and also the teammates on the court. I tried to do the first part, but even that could definitely be improved upon. The second part is very tricky.
<div class="quote_poster">michiganave17 Wrote</div><div class="quote_post">could you guys do a dennis rodman/Ben wallace comparison? Also a tim duncan /KG comparison.</div> I second this request
Dennis Rodman would be impossible, since I don't have any of his +/- numbers. I could get the numbers for Ben Wallace, Tim Duncan, and Garnett ... but it would have to be for last year only (since www.basketballvalue.com only has compiled the data for last season).
