Reply to thread

Message: [QUOTE="auror, post: 5351285, member: 1329"] I want to be clear. I don't think he's a bad defender. Hurley thinks he's a good defender, and he is the person who would know best. Specifically the plus/minus stats say that last year the team was worse defensively with him on the court by a substantial margin (not all defensive stats are calculated based on this). There can be many reasons for this, not the least of which is that defensive metrics aren't that accurate because of how important the collective is to defense as opposed to the individual. As noted in my post, a lot of it was also caused by bad shooting luck against the team with him on the court. The team in general was plagued by this, and this is generally not a sticky stat, which is why the good sites employ luck-adjustments. Defensive stats can be unreliable and his eye test and Hurley test passes, but at the same time the magnitude of how much worse the team was on defense with him on the court is something that is hard to handwave away. Potential reasons for this discrepancy: him being a good defender, but not a great one, and as a sophomore assigned to players above his level because he was the best of bad options. And then he played aggressively, leading to points and fouls given up (fouls are the slow death of a defense). Being out of position because he's trying too hard to cover for other people's mistakes, which actually hurts the integrity of the defense over the long run. Bad offense (in part caused by him) leading to more transition and semi-transition baskets against. Etc. On that topic, a random stat quirk I see looking into his D profile further was that the team was horrible in transition defense (not in frequency, but in effectiveness) with him on the court. I looked through other players to see if it was horrible with any of them on/off, but it was uniquely horrible with Ross in the game. Could be just a random unlucky thing that affected his stats, or maybe there's some merit in the film, you tell me. Something to keep an eye on as you go. Stats accuse, film convicts as they say. [/QUOTE]

Verification: First name of men's bb coach

Forum statistics

Threads: 164,667

Messages: 4,405,847

Members: 10,221

Latest member: abbbb