As the NBA regular season winds down, NBA award season is ramping up. Shortly after the season is over, the NBA will announce Most Valuable Player, Defensive Player of the Year, Rookie of the Year, and more. A panel of approximately 100 sportswriters and broadcasters decide most regular-season awards. They participate in a ranked vote that allots points to each player based on their rank. The points are then totaled, and that determines the winner.
Patrick Beverley has been vocal about his belief that he should be considered for Defensive Player of the Year this season, and he’s not wrong. Last season, the Timberwolves ranked 26th in the NBA in defensive rating at 115.55 with mostly the same roster. After adding Pat Bev to the starting line-up this year and making significant scheme changes, Minnesota’s defense has jumped to 11th overall at 111.38. Individually, Beverley is also having a great defensive year, averaging 1.1 steals, 0.9 blocks, and 4.2 rebounds a game, all while the Wolves coaching staff usually asks him to defend one of the best opposing players.
However, if you look at NBA.com’s most recent Defensive Player Ladder, Pat Bev’s name isn’t even mentioned in the article. Similarly, if you look at betting odds for Defensive Player of the Year, Pat Bev’s name isn’t on the list of options.
Why isn’t Pat Bev being considered?
Earlier this week, former NBA sharpshooter J.J. Redick hosted Beverley on his podcast “The Old Man & the Three.” They covered several subjects, including what Pat Bev has brought to the Timberwolves culture, his relationship with his new teammates, and his chemistry with the coaching staff.
But one of the most illuminating points they bring up is how statistics can alter people’s view of a player. Redick points out that many “advanced stats do favor big players and specifically guys that rebound the ball a lot.” One of the most common defensive stats, “Defensive Rating,” is calculated in part by including Defensive Stops.
According to Basketball-Reference.com
Stops take into account the instances of a player ending an opposing possession that are tracked in the boxscore (blocks, steals, and defensive rebounds), in addition to an estimate for the number of forced turnovers and forced misses by the player which aren’t captured by steals and blocks.
With this in mind, it’s easy to see why Defensive Rating favors centers and power forwards. Blocks and defensive rebounds are much easier to get when your role on defense is primarily to stand near the basket to protect the rim from driving offensive players and rebound missed shots. That does not mean that the stat is invalid or poorly calculated. But it means that it will be rare to see a guard at the top of a Defensive Rating ranking list.
Among active players, the only true guard in the top 20 in career defensive rating is Rajon Rondo, with a Defensive Rating of 104.11. Danny Green is on the list and is a hybrid shooting guard/small forward. However, he is tall for his position at 6’6″, which benefits his ability to get blocks and rebounds. The rest of the list is full of centers like Rudy Gobert, Dwight Howard, and Andre Drummond, who are primarily rim protectors and rebounders on defense.
Gobert is extremely important to the Utah Jazz’s defense, of course. There’s no denying that he is one of the best defenders in the league. However, because of the way that Defensive Rating is weighted towards centers and power forwards, it doesn’t paint a complete picture of how good a defender is.
As we saw in last years’ playoffs, a smart coach like Tyronn Lue can find ways to counter drop coverage, even against one of the best defensive bigs in the league. By playing smaller, faster line-ups, Lou and the Los Angeles Clippers could force Gobert to switch on to faster players. They could either blow by him or draw him out of the paint to get the ball to teammates who had an easier opportunity to score without Gobert lurking around the rim.
If the Jazz had better perimeter defenders, then it wouldn’t be as easy to exploit Gobert’s few weaknesses on defense. Opponents would have fewer free runs at the rim. However, to be called the best defender in the league, you should be able to defend multiple positions in multiple different styles of defense. If the flaws of a primarily rim-protecting center are so easily exposed in the playoffs, it seems that the awards committee may be overvaluing big men for DPOY.
That bias towards big men and rim protectors doesn’t just affect Beverley’s chance to win DPOY. It has historically affected all guards’ chances. A guard hasn’t won the DPOY since 1996 when Gary Payton won as a member of the Seattle SuperSonics. Only four other guards have won the award since its inception in 1983: Michael Jordan, Sidney Moncrief, Alvin Robertson, and Michael Cooper.
Part of the issue may be that teams often task their best defending guard to defend against some of the league’s most dominant offensive players. If your coaches task you with guarding Steph Curry, Trae Young, or Ja Morant on a nightly basis, you will give up a few buckets no matter what. Those points affect your defensive rating. Therefore, they often make players look like worse defenders than they are because of the difficulty of their task. For example, Jrue Holiday is widely known as one of the best perimeter defenders in the league. He has been named to First Team All-Defense twice and Second Team once. Holiday’s Defensive Rating this year is 111.0, which ties him with his teammate Pat Connaughton, a player who most analysts would not consider to be nearly as good of a defender.
Moreover, Holiday ranks 65th amongst active players in career defensive rating behind several guards who are not known as good defenders, including Curry and James Harden. Curry has played most of his career with some of the best defenders in the league, including Draymond Green and Klay Thompson. As a result, he has rarely been expected to guard an opponent’s best player and gets to hide on an easier assignment.
Basketball-Reference points out that “individual Defensive Ratings are heavily influenced by the team’s defensive efficiency.” They assume that all teammates are equally good (per minute) at forcing non-steal turnovers and non-block misses.” Curry’s individual Defensive Rating has benefited greatly from his team’s high-level Defensive Rating. Thus the statistic likely overrates how good of a defender Curry actually is.
For the sake of guards that are defensive specialists, there needs to be some other measurement of a players’ defensive value that is more representative of the guard skill set. Perhaps there will never be one all-encompassing way to measure a defender’s individual ability with a statistic. But regardless, it may be time we stop using Defensive Rating (and other advanced stats that incorporate it) to judge who the defensive player of the year is. Instead, they should let coaches decide, as Pat Bev suggested in his interview with Redick.
