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Boston’s Kyrie Irving was regarded as a slightly above-average defender by RPM last year, for instance. We’ve been obsessed with this opponents’ shooting data for a while, in part because it sometimes seemed to track closely with players who had stronger or weaker defensive reputations than you would infer from other advanced statistics such as Real Plus-Minus. Opponents made only 45 percent of those field goal attempts, well below the roughly 49 percent that Second Spectrum estimates “should” have gone in against average defense for a given distance to the basket. Last regular season, for example, NBA Defensive Player of the Year Rudy Gobert defended a league-high 1,426 shots, according to motion tracking data by Second Spectrum, which identifies the nearest defender on every field goal attempt. That is, until a few years ago, when the NBA started publishing data on opponents’ shooting. If an opponent gets hot against your team and shoots 53 for 91 en route to scoring 130 points, we know your team defended poorly in the aggregate, but we don’t know which players to blame. But there’s no direct measure of shooting defense (other than blocks, which account for a relatively small fraction of missed shots). There are individual defensive statistics such as rebounds and steals, of course. But if no one kept track of who was taking shots and making buckets, we’d have, at best, an extremely fuzzy impression of which players were actually any good, even if we had access to all their other statistics.īut believe it or not, this had long been the situation when it came to measuring player defense. Shooting isn’t the only important action that takes place on a basketball court, obviously. Basketball, in some sense, is fundamentally a shooting game.