A Data Viz Driven Case for Anthony Davis as Defensive Player of the Year
Can the Lakers’ star’s defensive versatility clinch him the award?
After being drafted first overall in 2012 by the New Orleans Pelicans (then called the New Orleans Hornets), Anthony Davis has delivered great performances year in and year out. However, that success was more on a “personal” level, as the Pelicans only made the playoffs twice, in 2014–15 and 2017–18. AD was great in those playoff performances, but the furthest the Pels reached was the second round in 2017–18.
Through his first seven seasons, Davis has been recognized as one of the best defenders in the league, and yet he only made an All-Defensive team three times (All-Defensive teams consist of the best defenders in the league in a single season, as voted by journalists). Did the team success (or lack thereof) throttle Davis’s chances of winning a Defensive Player of the Year (DPOY) award or two? Or was it that he just wasn’t that good yet? In advance of the NBA’s long awaited restart, it’s the perfect time to take another look.
Defensive Feats During Early Career
Even before the NBA, Davis was already famous on a nationwide level. Davis was a player of the year in college and won the award for the Defensive player of the Year, also on the collegiate level. After that, he was elected to be a member of the 2012 Olympic team, which is a big deal for any athlete.
He quickly got to the main stage, earning an All-Star appearance in his sophomore season, after a good rookie season for such a young and raw player.
In 2014–15, we got a real glimpse of what AD was capable of doing, as he led the team to the playoffs and received multiple votes for MVP and DPOY (finishing fifth and fourth in voting, respectively). That was also the first year he earned himself a spot on an All-Defensive team.
I’ll introduce now a chart which will be used throughout this post, and which paints the picture of how effectively one player defends areas on the basketball court.
In the chart below you can see the defensive efficiency by Davis in the 2014–15 season. When I say efficiency, I mean how effectively Davis stopped shots by opposing players in certain areas. The areas are defined by the distance from the rim (as seen with approximated arcs). If the color is blue, that means that opposing shooters were cold from that area, meaning that the defensive player — in this case Anthony Davis — was effective in stopping them. On the other hand, if the color of an area is red, that means that the defensive player defended poorly from that area. The data for this chart and all other Defensive Efficiency Charts is retrieved from stats.nba.com (link goes to data by Anthony Davis).
The following season was another good one for Davis, but not good enough, as his team missed out on the playoffs. That also resulted in poor voting results for AD in both of the previously mentioned awards. It is worth noting that starting in 2015–16, and all the way up to this season, Davis spent more time at center than he did at power forward (according to Basketball-Reference), which is his preferred position.
Even when DeMarcus Cousins (who was a center and one of the best players at his position at the time) played for the Pelicans, Davis spent most of the time at center (but that was also probably because of Cousins’s truncated spell with the Pels, thanks to a midseason trade in 2016-17 and injury in 2017-18). The pair seemed destined to be the next Twin Towers (a reference to the great Spurs team in the late ’90s and early 2000's, led by David Robinson and Tim Duncan), but Cousins’s injury stopped them from achieving that status. Davis put up an amazing season after that injury and led the Pelicans to the second round.
Those two seasons with DeMarcus Cousins as a teammate were the other two in fact which yielded him a spot on an All-Defensive Team.
The 2017–18 season was especially impressive, and one in which Davis ended up third in voting for the DPOY award behind Rudy Gobert and Joel Embiid. The defensive chart confirms that, as he kept his opponents freezing cold.
What did hinder AD’s chances at the DPOY award?
One could argue that Davis would acquire even more accolades had the Pelicans been a better team, but in the past 10 years, some of the DPOY award winners weren’t even playing for top-four teams in the conference. When Tyson Chandler won, he was even playing for the Knicks, who finished seventh in the Eastern conference in 2011–12.
But what have they done differently than Davis?
Table of winners’ and AD’s stats
Here are some basic stats: DWS, DBPM, Defensive On-Off Rating, and team record.
DWS stands for Defensive Win Shares, a statistic that represents the number of wins a player has produced for his team thanks to his defensive abilities.
DBPM is short for Defensive Box Plus-Minus, a statistic that represents a player’s quality and contribution based on defensive stats from box scores.
And in the end, Defensive On-Off rating is simply a difference between defensive rating that team has while a player is on the court versus when that same player is off the court. The more negative the number is, the better.
There are more stats that could represent a player’s impact even more holistically, but these are a few of the easiest to find and compare through so many seasons (I’ll touch on some other stats later).
All players in this table have something in common (except for Chandler), as they were all in Top 5 in either DBPM or DWS in the year they won DPOY. And their teams were playoff contenders. So basically, even in the years when AD performed really well, it just wasn’t enough. Also, these stats don’t tell the whole picture, because Green and Leonard do so many other things really well and oftentimes opposing players just straight up avoided matching up with them.
AD made the All-Defensive team in 2014–15, 2016–17, and 2017–18 season, and that correlates well with the success of the team. Two out of three of those seasons were winning seasons, and seasons in which Pelicans made the playoffs.
And while the overall Pelicans’ record might be bad, their defensive side was even worse. The Hornets/Pelicans ended up 28th, 27th, 22nd (*), 27th, 9th (*), 14th (*), and 23rd in team defensive rating through Davis’ career (asterisk denotes the seasons in which he made All-Defensive team). Those numbers are just horrendous. Only one top 10 finish, and that was in a losing season (2016–17).
To conclude AD’s chapter with Pelicans, it is safe to say that he only had one real opportunity at the DPOY award, back in the 2017-18 season, when he was amazing on the offensive side of the ball as well.
Back to the Present Time
Unlike the previous seasons, AD is finally on a championship-contending team. A team that excels on both offense and defense. The Lakers are third in Defensive Rating, and currently leading the Western Conference standings. And Davis plays a big part in that. Let’s take a look at how.
Position
The Lakers allowed Davis to slide into his preferred position, power forward , and they provided him with two quality rim defending partners in JaVale McGee and Dwight Howard. Even though both are out of their prime years, they provide quality rotation minutes.
Davis also fills in as a small-ball center, especially in late-game situations.
This appears to align with AD stating that he doesn’t mind playing as a center if it makes sense.
Defensive Versatility
We have finally come to the one of the key characteristics that makes Davis a phenomenal defensive player, and in many ways, the crux of this article. Throughout his career, Davis has shown how he can defend all positions at all distances from the basket.
Whether he had to spend time on a perimeter against a forward, take on an opposing guard after a pick and roll, or simply defend a big man in the post, Davis has strung together success after success (as you can see on his defensive charts).
But this season, he has taken that versatility to another level. He spends most of his time on the 3-point line where he either defends players who try to create their own shots or covers the players who shoot from spot-up or screen plays.
The following chart shows how much time Anthony Davis has spent on defending each specific position.
He is mostly matched up with forwards, after that with guards, and only then he is matched up with centers. That changed during the years, he was always matched up with big men and only then with guards, but he plays as a true power forward this year. Davis is an elite Perimeter Defending Big Man (I think I saw that term on BBall Index in a tweet once, so credit to them).
Let’s take a look at another graph showing the change of defended shots depending on the distance of that shot.
When looking at 3-point shots, you can see the spike in 2017–18 and then the drop in last year’s numbers. Had they brought in a different player alongside him last year (not Julius Randle), Davis might still be with Pelicans rather than the Lakers. But we’ll never know now, and both sides appear to have profited from the trade by early indications.
Blocking Machine
Throughout his career, Anthony Davis has secured three “titles” for most blocks in a season. He led the league in that stat in 2013–14, 2014–15, and 2017–18. This season he is tied for third overall with Brook Lopez (and Jonathan Isaac, who has missed many more games) with 2.4 blocks per game.
But the interesting thing here is that Davis is leading the NBA in blocks outside of the restricted area, which is the area of the floor around the rim.
The players right behind Davis are Robinson, Whiteside, Lopez, and Gobert, all of whom are considered elite shot blockers in their own right. After them, there is the aforementioned Jonathan Isaac, who shined in that aspect and could be an AD-like player on defense someday.
So with that fact in mind, let’s take a look at AD’s block chart, which simply shows where he blocks opposing shots.
Davis is clearly all over the floor on defense, and it is not often that you see someone block so many shots outside of the restricted area and the paint.
So is it time for the DPOY?
With all that said, probably not.
Even though his season is again great and probably his best so far, Davis is still likely to lose in the DPOY race. The reason is rather simple …
Giannis Antetokounmpo’s defensive season is simply amazing. He, as well as the Bucks as a whole, is historically good at defending the paint. Allowing only 41% field goal efficiency is almost unprecedented.
One could say that Giannis doesn’t carry the biggest load on the defensive side and that Brook Lopez is the cornerstone of the defense, but his advanced metrics are also absolutely amazing …
Stats Breakdown, Giannis vs Davis
In this table, I used some of the already mentioned stats, along with two more popular public well-regarded advanced stats, Raptor and PIPM. So it’s not that Giannis has a slight edge, he is crushing AD and everyone else in DPOY competition, as he hurtles towards the rare MVP/DPOY doubleheader.
Toward the Playoffs
Fingers crossed, if the NBA season continues and we manage to reach playoffs, I’m excited to watch Anthony Davis play probably the best basketball of his career with an opportunity to do it for a sustained run. He has shown throughout his career a knack for various ways to take over a game not just by scoring, but by snuffing out the opponent’s ability to do as as well. Add in LeBron James to the mix, and the possibilities are endless.
We’ve seen what AD has been capable of with his defensive versatility throughout past seasons. It will be critical again in allowing the Lakers to explore numerous ways of matching up, both with tough opposition in the Western Conference, and who knows, potentially even with Giannis and the Milwaukee Bucks in the finals.
Data used for this post is retrieved from stats.nba.com and basketball-reference, along with sites already linked to RAPTOR and PIPM metrics.
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