Defense In The Shadows
What soccer defense can tell us about NBA defense
Three Footballers
Johann Cruyff in his 2016 autobiography, My Turn, talking about how he turned midfielders Ronald Koeman and Pep Guardiola into center backs:
Defending is a matter of positioning, agility, and ability to attack. If you have those three elements in your team, you don’t even need to defend.
Two days ago, Memphis Grizzlies (interim) head coach Tuomas Iisalo, comparing Draymond Green to Italian soccer great Paolo Maldini:
His ability to put out fires, so to speak, is incredible. His court-mapping is so high level, he can see issues developing like way earlier than most players…A lot of times, by moving into the right position, he can prevent those from even happening.
Former Spain coach Vicente Del Bosque with a likely apocryphal take on defensive midfielder Sergio Busquets:
If you watch the game, you don’t see Busquets. But if you watch Busquets, you see the whole game.
Busquets was always in the right place at the right time. He did not have the flashy interceptions. But how does one quantify the flashiness of interceptions that weren’t needed. Interceptions precluded so to speak. That isn’t a rhetorical question; I’m sure someone will eventually have a reasonable measure for that.
What are we missing?
It’s cliche at this point to note that some of the most substantive contributions a basketball player can make on the court do not show up in the box score. Sure, there are box score-adjacent metrics; your hockey assists, screen assists, plus/minus, and so on. And then there are the advanced metrics, the “VORPs and SCHNORPS” as Zach Lowe (welcome back, we’ve missed you) called them. When those metrics bear out the gaudy counting stats, we view it as validation for the metrics. It just makes sense that Shai-Gilgeous Alexander and Nikola Jokic lap the field when it comes to EPM, RAPM, and so on.
It should also tell us something when those metrics throw up a seeming anomaly like Jokic, once described as playing every possession in bathroom slippers, being a defensive stud. The key quote in that story, one man’s opinion:
"A lot of times on out-of-bounds plays, he'll literally move you into the spot. He does it every single game. [Viewers] may not see it, and it might be subtle, but he moves you into your spot," wing Christian Braun told ESPN.
We may not be far removed from someone figuring out a metric that uses tracking data to tell us how often someone is in the right spot on defense (and in the case of QBs like Jokic, how often he gets others into the right spots on defense.)
What Draymond does in the shadows
Number 30 will always be the greatest show in a Warriors jersey. Draymond Green on defense has to be a close second. Treasure his defensive mind while we have it on court.
Watch the step up before Jordan Goodwin (Lakers 30) has even completed his first step towards setting a screen for Luka Doncic. Or the subtle bump on Luka that prevents him from using the screen effectively, allowing Doncic’s defender Jimmy Butler III to stay attached. Or the help, cutting off a Doncic shot.
No commentary needed, watch Draymond on this entire possession:
Draymond is right up there in a number of hustle categories. The on/off numbers on defense speak for themselves. And I still feel that we aren’t adequately capturing his defensive impact adequately. As Michael Pina puts it:
…he’s still everything everywhere all at once, disrupting opposing sets, taking away the paint, roaming into empty space and claiming his territory in a way no one else either does or can
I’m not saying that Dyson Daniels’ steals and deflections are orthogonal to the Defensive Player of the Year conversation, or that Shai-Gilgeous Alexander may be more of a plus on defense than Jokic (although cards on the table, Daniels’ defensive impact may be overstated and I think the defensive gap between Shai and Jokic is smaller than the consensus believes.) But we may all just be really bad at quantifying defensive impact and any appeal to quantitative metrics as currently constructed may be a case of searching for lost keys where the light is, not where we lost them.
In the meantime, how about the Busquets/Draymond-Steph/Messi analogy?