Jeff Van Gundy explains in a cool feature for the Play website. Given that defense is half of basketball, there's shockingly little discussion of it in the sports media. Everyone knows that Boston has put together a great defense this year, but you don't hear much about what makes it so great except for vague allusions to Kevin Garnett's "intensity." I'm sure he's intense, but there's more to it than that.
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How to Play Defense
05 Mar 2008 12:13 pm
Comments (13)
I can't listen at work, but the following text in the graphic struck me as odd: "And yet defense is still critical to a title: 34 of the N.B.A.’s 61 champions led the league in scoring differential, a defining defensive measurement. By contrast, just 10 champs have topped the charts in scoring."
Scoring differential is a "defining defensive measurement"? By definition, doesn't it have as much to do with offense as with defense?
I haven't listened yet either, but I read the intro and had the same thought at Al. The NYT sometimes has interesting sports articles (I've read a couple of good things in this Play magazine), but they make basic errors that no small-town daily with a decent sports section would make.
re the Rockets defense this year - substituting younger bodies (Scola and Landry) for Juwan Howard will do that for you.
JVG sounds weirdly sedated in those clips.
Man, I didn't realize basketball was that complicated.
Thanks for the tip. Came here for politics and ended up with a tip that's gonna help out in this week's Maryland 3A High School Regional Quarterfinals. A welcome respite from my tequila-fueled despair at last night's victory by Rush Limbaugh.
Frankly, I'm of the opinion that half the people playing basketball have no idea what they're doing. This comes from the simple fact that even basketball coaches continue to use the average of points surrendered per game instead of points per possession as the definite metric on defensive performance. I guess the problem isn't really that these guys don't know what they're doing, but all of their work is based on intuition. They just don't have any tools to measure whether what they're doing is working or not. As a result, sometimes you get really bad results. It's not much different than the Jaguars thinking they played a good game against the Patriots by preventing big plays on defense and making sure the game had very few drives, but letting the Pats score a TD on every single drive when the game was in question, except for one FG.
The intro of the piece is pretty mindless, but Van Gundy's part is interesting. I think he's talking that slowly so he matches the graphics.
The graphics were confusing. I would have liked to see the players actually moving around, instead of all those arrows.
Given that defense is half of basketball...
Why is this given? There could well exist some types of games for which every team is pretty much as good at defense as every other, but teams differ widely in their ability to play offense. In that case, offense would be virtually 100% of that game.
We know this isn't the case for basketball, because statistics show that some teams are better than others at defense. But exactly HOW MUCH of the difference between teams is due to differences in offensive ability vs. defensive ability must be established from the data...it isn't simply "given" that it's half and half.
ed: Generally, that platitude is taken to mean that on average, a team spends half its time on defense.
There are a couple of D-whatever colleges (I believe Grinnell is one of them) that play an 'all-three-pointers-all-the-time' style of game. Part of the style involves not bothering much with defense.
http://web.grinnell.edu/sandb/archives/volume_120/number_17/sports/article1.html
Comments closed March 19, 2008.
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Heads in the Sand
I always thought of JVG as a defensive expert.
But seeing what Adelman, an offensive expert, has been getting out of the Rockets defensively this year I'm starting to question that narrative.
But one thing is for sure, JVG is a great interview.
Posted by Davebo | March 5, 2008 12:39 PM