i should note all those guys have APMs (aside from Duhon) that are well below their highly regarded offensive skills. Hmm.

Yeah I'm surprised about Duhon. He does get smoked on-the-ball, but it seems like he's always paying attention and giving full effort. He was pretty broken down for the last 20ish games last year. He's not really cut out for playing 37mpg on a very fast-paced team.

The defensive rankings are basically the same thing as the offensive ones, but for the player's matchup. The matchup algorithm isn't perfect, nor will it ever be, but for this group, it is pretty close, from what I can tell. I think Duhon is being penalized for having to play out-of-position with Nate on the floor a lot. (the algorithm is correct to assume Duhon guards the 2 in this configuration, right?) His numbers are better at PG, but still not good.

Ya, I'm not saying this is anywhere close to the final word on defense, and there are all sorts of factors that could contribute to a player looking good or bad here, but these guys did have a nice combination of volume and efficiency against them, and as far as defensive value can be measured by counterpart production, they got destroyed.

Oh, I also somehow forgot Caron Butler. He should be on there too.

That's my all time favorite episode, where Homer becomes president of the union. So many great moments.

Don't know much about Paxil, but it is the subject line in one of my top three favorite 2+2 threads ever, which is now buried in the mod forum archives or I'd link it. Not sure anyone else reading this even would remember it except for Cla.rk, who was on fire in it. "Girl on Paxil, things changing" was the title or something like that.

Not familiar with the part you quoted but is this the "Lisa needs braces / DENTAL PLAN" episode?

Yes. It's widely regarded by learned folk as the pinnacle of human achievement. The hit:miss ratio on gags in that episode is like 213:0.

Oh, if only we'd listened to that young man, instead of walling him up in the abandoned coke oven.

I combined snorting paxil with a funnel of 8 jaegger shots once in college...ended up getting blown by a dude later that night

First thing tomorrow, I'm punching Lenny in the back of the head

Well, at least you were the wizardplower and not the wizardplowee. It could have been worse.

wow, i missed that thread. and i havent missed much.

If he guarded the 4 instead of the 5 like he should be on a real team I'd imagine he would better

Jesus

lol. ygos

Wow.

I was 27 before I experienced a good cuckolding.

lol, everyone's taking that post pretty seriously, I kinda just figured he was joking or it was a movie quote I wasn't familiar with...obviously we need some follow up to that post either way

Where does Jose Manuel Calderon rank in your most abused defenders list?

So you like donuts eh?

But the telephone is so impersonal. I prefer the hands-on touch you only get with hired goons.

He's down around #75. Toronto defends the different types of shots decently. Their problem is they allow a lot of high-efficiency attempts -- close shots and threes. That distribution causes the overall defensive efficiency to suffer in a mirror image of their offensive shot distribution woes. Bosh, Bargs, Marion, and Kapono all rate worse than Calderon, but it's not clear who exactly is to blame for each defensive breakdown.

Kapono looks REAL bad, though, given that he puts up those awful numbers on bench player minutes. He's almost certainly a significant net negative on the floor.

Good thing we traded him for Kimbo Slice.

How we - or at least most fans - rate NBA players defensively really is flawed. We get our info from sportscasters who are, by and large, not that insightful and would rather say something interesting and sensational than factual. We tend to infer a positive relationship between steals and defense - even though there are legitimate arguments that that relationship is an inverse one for most players. Same for blocks.

When a more legitimate defensive metric comes along, we tend to react with great suspicion largely because it will likely fail to match up in our minds with, imo, a flawed intuitive understanding of that topic.

I'm far more persuaded by Session's amazing opponent eFG% that he's a very good m2m defender than I am by the passionate arguments Celts fans tend to make in favor of Rondo being an elite defensive PG.

It's hard to make any definitive statements from this one metric, but I think it can definitely lead us toward better analysis of players.

Sessions numbers really are incredible. He basically neutralizes his opposition's offensive output, and does so at a pretty good volume. He ranks about #100 in terms of volume against, but he's around #375 in terms of value against.

For all the bitching about the Lakers PG defense, Fisher is right next to Rondo as about the 250th most abused defender in the league. To be fair, Rondo adds about 0.3pts/g in steal value over Fish.

I know people have done stuff like track AI's opponent production over a number of games and laugh, and my numbers (he's #20) seem to back it up, but there are a number of guys out there whose defensive reputation does not correlate with their counterparts' production, and it's going to take good reasons why I should expect a player's value to lie in other areas for me to move away from counterpart production as a main defensive stat.

I'm pretty sure NBDL MVP Courtney Sims was lifting at my gym today. This guy was wearing a Michigan basketball t-shirt and Sims is from Roslindale so I'm pretty sure it was him.

There was a group of 6 to 10 guys who were all 6'10"+ with a couple coaches. (I'm 6'5" and I was absolutely dwarfed.) I didn't recognize anyone else. They were all lifting in their Jordans (some of them were squatting) and I understand that's probably a no-no.