Everything Valanciunas

[Barolt]

Bebe is not looking that great either. Man...all I want is for our C to be a defensive anchor who is not abysmal on offense.

The problem with all defensive stats is that you play defense as a unit. Just like it's hard to statistically account for the difference between Ross spacing the floor at the 3pt line versus Scola in the same position, it's hard to statistically account for the difference between letting a man blow by you into the lane and leading your man into the lane in such a way that he'll run into your big man.

There's a huge difference basketball wise, but how do we track that?

[A.I]

Bebe is not looking that great either. Man...all I want is for our C to be a defensive anchor who is not abysmal on offense.

JV is as good as it gets for us. Just replace Scola with Patterson or someone at least decent and wait till Carroll is back.

[KHD]

Interestingly, by the way, we give up more attempts at the rim per 36 with Bismack on the floor than with JV on.

JV forces jumpshots and floaters on PnR's, Biyombo jumps way to far up and gives up the layup.

Saw this at least 5 times last night.

[Barolt]

A big thing to keep in mind is that defense is really, really complicated. You can watch a 10 second defensive sequence 10 times, and notice something new that happened every time.

[3inthekeon]

Lets hold on a second and qualify that. JV plays ~half his minutes with JJ/Lowry/DeMar/Scola in the last two months.

NONE of those guys can stop penetration this year. Bismack looks better because he plays most of his minutes with Patterson/Joseph/Ross, who are better defenders.

Not just penetration. As of a couple of weeks ago JV and BB were #1 and #2 in the league in Help%. When one of them helps, their man is open for an easy bucket unless one of his teammates properly rotates. Just a guess, but JV's crew has probably blown more than their share of rotations.

BTW, BB's crew isn't perfect either - remember him yelling at his teammates in the Pistons game when they kept failing to rotate on Baynes?

[JimiCliff]

Opponents are shooting 65% at the rim vs Valanciunas, which is the worst mark of his career. Biyombo holding opponents to 54% (4th in NBA)

— Josh Lewenberg (@JLew1050) March 5, 2016

did his rim protection really dropped that bad?

My guess is that it has to do with ICEing the pick and rolls. When that goes bad, there's going to be an easy shot at the rim. Last year, the pnr scheme gave up open jumpers. I'll bet if you look at his one on one post defence this year, it's not that different from before.

[OldSkoolCool]

I think the reason why JV has a high FG% at the rim is that he is good at containing the guard until the get close to the paint and the guard puts up a pass to his man, and JV is close enough to qualify for the statistical contest while his man has a wide open layup...driving up his %

It's a pretty common occurrence.


I will say that he has done a great job at preventing penetration from the guards, at least much better than Biz

[DanH]

Opponents are shooting 65% at the rim vs Valanciunas, which is the worst mark of his career. Biyombo holding opponents to 54% (4th in NBA)

— Josh Lewenberg (@JLew1050) March 5, 2016

did his rim protection really dropped that bad?

I did some quick viability checks on rim protection numbers in terms of whether a player's current year DFG% at the rim is in any way predicted by prior years of rim protection DFG%. Turns out, not at all. I'm completely out on whether DFG% is descriptive of ability or performance at all - seems to me it is mostly noise and luck. There are a half dozen guys who maintain consistently good numbers, but outside of those elites the variation from year to year is ridiculous. JV's is on the high end, but most players experience wild swings (based on the three seasons the numbers are available on NBA.com). The best I could manage in terms of an R-squared value for a correlation between one year's DFG% and the next one's was about 0.3. Which s very poor. And that's if I use only the top 50 or so rim protectors to filter out smaller sample variations, and allow the regression to intercept off zero, meaning the regression is already allowing for a non-self-predicting value - ie a guy with 40% DFG% would NOT be predicted to have 40% DFG% the following season even with an ideal zero variation from the line of best fit. If I force a slope close to one (self predicting) the R-squared drops to near zero, effectively zero correlation between one year's DFG% and the next.

Let me see, I posted it somewhere at some point... Aha, here:

[DanH]

Is that showing up? I can't see it...

Edit: ok, fixed now.

[Barolt]

I did some quick viability checks on rim protection numbers in terms of whether a player's current year DFG% at the rim is in any way predicted by prior years of rim protection DFG%. Turns out, not at all. I'm completely out on whether DFG% is descriptive of ability or performance at all - seems to me it is mostly noise and luck. There are a half dozen guys who maintain consistently good numbers, but outside of those elites the variation from year to year is ridiculous. JV's is on the high end, but most players experience wild swings (based on the three seasons the numbers are available on NBA.com). The best I could manage in terms of an R-squared value for a correlation between one year's DFG% and the next one's was about 0.3. Which s very poor. And that's if I use only the top 50 or so rim protectors to filter out smaller sample variations, and allow the regression to intercept off zero, meaning the regression is already allowing for a non-self-predicting value - ie a guy with 40% DFG% would NOT be predicted to have 40% DFG% the following season even with an ideal zero variation from the line of best fit. If I force a slope close to one (self predicting) the R-squared drops to near zero, effectively zero correlation between one year's DFG% and the next.

Let me see, I posted it somewhere at some point... Aha, here:

The image isn't showing, but the analysis doesn't surprise me at all. At a cursory glance I've noticed similar things.

EDIT: Somehow it shows up in my reply.

[consmap]

I see lots of squares, triangles, and diamonds scattered randomly on a graph

[consmap]

I think the reason why JV has a high FG% at the rim is that he is good at containing the guard until the get close to the paint and the guard puts up a pass to his man, and JV is close enough to qualify for the statistical contest while his man has a wide open layup...driving up his %

It's a pretty common occurrence.


I will say that he has done a great job at preventing penetration from the guards, at least much better than Biz

I see this a lot too. He's not able to recover quickly like Biz and get a block while out of position, but when he's in position a lot of the time the guard has to settle for a less than ideal shot. If the guard defending the ball handler isn't able to recover while JV is containing, it ends up being trouble because then the big man is open on the roll or dump off.

[DanH]

I see lots of squares, triangles, and diamonds scattered randomly on a graph

Exactly.

[Barolt]

What I got from DanH's graph is that next year JV will either be prime Mutombo, or he'll be Bargnani.

[white men can't jump]

What I got from DanH's graph is that next year JV will either be prime Mutombo, or he'll be Bargnani.

More like could be, but yeah, that's basically the "usefulness" of the stat.