AZGrizFan said:
An announcer a couple games ago was spouting a stat about how many points below their season average Whitney was holding his opponents, and it was glaring. Can/do they compare THAT figure? Because let's be honest, the rest of those stats are just window dressing...
In my humble opinion the stat of how much lower a person scored doesn’t really tell you much either. It is easily understandable but totally disregards the team aspect of defense. Switches, trapping off screens forcing guys baseline for your help to come over are all examples of when it is more than just one player getting the job done. Conversely, if he gets credit for those games does he also get the blame for McEwen scoring 32 and 24? Knight scoring 26? Bishop scoring 27?
I have read a number of good articles on quantifying defense (such as this one https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theringer.com/platform/amp/nba/2021/5/11/22423517/nba-defense-analytics-nikola-jokic). And people that do it for a living admit it’s almost impossible to do.
In addition there are a number of defensive metrics that would suggest Whitney isn’t even the best defender on the Griz. Grizfan-24 said Bannan was 2nd in conference in Defensive Win Shares. If we are looking at the same source, Beasley was 10th. Lonnell Martin is also ahead of Whitney. Whitney is tied for 4th on the Griz with DCH and Parker.
Other defensive stats such as Defensive Rating, also have Whitney 4 or 5 on the Griz. Could that be because Whitney guards the best player so even though he may have worse numbers he could still be doing an elite job because someone else is just responsible for a player that stands in the corner?
That is not what I see when I watch and it’s obviously not what Travis sees either as he thinks Whitney is a top defensive player in the conference.
So I guess in sum, defense is very difficult to quantify with all defensive stats and metrics having big flaws.