Just Some Notes on Defense and Movement
Teams with lots of movement and little defense tend to have faster, skinnier bigs (Mitchell Robinson, Anthony Davis, Dewayne Dedmon, WCS). For all the emphasis we place on these types of bigs, it seems intelligence on defense is signficantly more important (see Lopez, Gasol, Horford).
Also… holy hell Cleveland is lazy.
Miami, Denver, Orlando, and Memphis were clustered together. They all had good defenses with slower bigs, and didn’t have to move as much on defense. While Denver and Orlando ended up faltering in the playoffs, I found (using data from the last 4 years) no correlation between regular season movement and playoff defense. In other words, movement on defense in the regular season is not a predictor of successful defense in playoff basketball.
Midrange shots vs DRTG
The Kings’ defense would stand to benefit from causing more midrange shots. It’s unlikely Luke Walton will help — The Lakers’ defense was better (108.9 DRTG), but caused very few midrange shots.
Atlanta’s defense would stand to improve from forcing more midrange shots, and it also might help them have to move less (though there’s only a very slight correlation between these two stats, I believe it has more to do with the other confounding variables that affect movement on defense). The thing is, do they have the talent to do it? I would think that between Collins, Dedmon, Prince, etc that the physical attributes are there. Coaching and individual defensive work will be key.
Top & Bottom 5 Defenses: Frequency of 2pt attempts at different times on shot clock
Top & Bottom 5 Defenses: Frequency of 3pt attempts at different times on shot clock
Bucks have a very similar shots allowed profile to bottom five defenses.
Top 5 defenses in general allow less shots early in the shot clock than bottom 5 defenses.
The first 7 seconds are the most important time to stop all shot attempts (it’s the largest difference between good and bad defenses). That’s when intensity has to be highest.
From 15–7 seconds left, good teams allow more 2s than 3s, bad teams allow more 3s than 2s. Bad defenses pack the paint too much in the middle of the shot clock.
The Bucks’ size helps them stop penetration, and they seem to pack the paint. This helps prevents drive and kick three pointers.
