North Carolina's Defense, Part Two
1. About a week ago, I wrote this post about how I thought North Carolina's defense was overrated by KenPom and others who advocate pace-adjusted statistics. I also posted it in the North Carolina thread on the sports board of a poker message board I post on. It got some comments, and I finally got a chance to respond tonight. My new post is below. The quoted items indicate a response that my original post got...
Rather than respond to each post that responded to me, I’m going to put all responses in this one. That way, I can jump back and forth and post my responses in something resembling a logical argument.
This comment might be a good place to start:
“I wouldn’t care if their defensive results were a byproduct of them hypnotizing the other team it is still good defense, even if their success is largely due to athleticism.”
You should care. Let’s pretend for a minute that North Carolina’s only defensive skill is that they can hypnotize their opponent. What happens when they come up against a team who is immune to hypnosis?
My argument is that Carolina’s pace acts the same way as hypnosis to falsely inflate their defensive stats. It works against most teams, but there are teams that won’t be “hypnotized,” because they possess poised and experienced guards, because they prefer to play at that fast pace as well, or both.
There’s nothing wrong with relying heavily on pace to help you defensively. But unless you are technically sound defensively, you’re not going to be good enough on that end of the court to be truly elite.
What do I mean by being technically sound defensively? Like offensive basketball, defensive basketball has fundamentals. Rotating to the open man is one I mentioned in my first post. Carolina gave Ohio St. a ton of open looks. That the Buckeyes couldn’t knock them down – and the reason why – isn’t important in the final discussion, because UNC is eventually going to run into a team that will hit those shots. Unless you’re forcing difficult shots – rushed shots due to defensive pressure, shots with a hand in the shooters face – you shouldn’t be satisfied with your defensive performance. Anything else is being results-oriented. If Carolina played a great three-point shooting team like Butler and decided that the best way to defend the Bulldogs was to pack everyone into the key and let them shoot jumpers, you wouldn’t praise the Heels’ defense even if Butler missed all their shots. You’d say that they got lucky that their opponent had an uncharacteristically poor shooting day.
Ohio St. may have missed good looks because they felt harried by the pace of the game, but there are teams who won’t be.
Another defensive skill is hedging on ball screens. This is something that Duke’s Kyle Singler does extremely well. When his man sets a screen on the man guarding the ball, Singler comes around to the side of the screen and forces the ballhandler to dribble laterally while his teammate catches up. If he decides to switch onto the ballhandler, he recognizes his height advantage and speed disadvantage, and takes a step back, without squaring his shoulders to the ballhandler. Instead, he’s at a slight angle -- always close enough to bother a shot, far enough way that he won’t get dribbled by – funneling the dribbler into the teeth of the defense.
The Carolina bigs don’t do this well. Incidentally, neither did Shelden Williams when he was at Duke. No one seemed to take advantage of it, but you could get Williams in foul trouble simply by sending the man Williams was guarding to set a screen on the ball; Williams always jumped them too far. It seemed like every game he was always getting whistled for one blocking foul by being stupidly over-aggressive hedging a screen.
“Your anecdotal evidence regarding defensive rotation is a perfect example of exactly what this article means to disprove – you don’t have to play a slow, grinding game to defend well.”
First, I think you mean that the article means to prove that you don’t have to play a slow, grinding game to defend well. That said, rotating well defensively or hedging ball screens properly has nothing to do with playing at a certain pace. Rotating well is good defense, at any tempo; leaving men open for good shots is bad defense at any tempo.
You also asked me to support my argument with something other than “I don’t agree.” I hope you see that the kinds of examples I’ve given are and were my attempt to do that.
One poster said he agreed with my general point, but disagreed with my reasoning for specific losses. He said that Carolina “had trouble containing dribble penetration.” That sounds like a great example of bad defense to me.
Speaking of my hypothesis for why Carolina lost certain games, a few of you took exception to that:
“There is a pretty big selection bias, as you are picking games they lost and then explaining why that team showed UNC had a bad defense.”
That’s not what I was doing. I was offering my hypothesis for why Carolina lost to certain teams that were hardly elite – that they are a fundamentally average defensive team whose pace of play masks that technical deficiency.
tarheeljks noted that “4 of the games UNC lost last year (Virginia Tech, Georgia Tech, N.C. State, and Maryland), were on the road, where KenPom concedes that the Heels were much weaker defensively.”
I can’t think of a good reason why a team would play significantly poorer defense on the road than they do at home. It’s not like baseball, where if you’re playing at Fenway or whatever they call Houston’s park now there are all these weird conditions you have to get used to. It’s the same court, the same ball. Sure, the home team may shoot a little bit better because the surroundings are familiar, but that only should really matter on open looks. If you’ve got a hand in a guy’s face or are forcing him to shoot a shot he doesn’t want to take, it’s just as hard to make it at home as it is on the road.
I think that the home/road discrepancy might come back to that pace thing. As we’ve already discussed, Carolina’s defense is effective if the opposition allows itself to be rattled by an unfamiliar, uptempo game. If you’re already feeling rushed, the crowd can play a big role in enhancing that feeling. On the road, when the crowd isn’t behind North Carolina to further bother the opponent, their defense suffers.
Finally, “I’m interested to hear what you think this stat is missing regarding defensive performance.”
My inability to eloquently answer this question has probably been the biggest reason I’ve now written more than 2,000 words on the topic of Carolina’s defense – if I could explain it well, I don’t know that I’d need all this other stuff.
Here’s my best attempt. KenPom’s stats are pace-adjusted, but what they don’t adjust for is the EFFECT that playing at a certain pace has. Points-per-possession stats treat every possession exactly the same: it has the value of 1. That’s why I wanted to see these stats for individual games; it’s my belief that Carolina’s defensive points-per-possession stats would be significantly worse in games against decent opponents whose preferred style is also uptempo.
I haven’t the slightest idea how to incorporate something like this into a statistic, or if it’s even possible. And like I’ve said all along, I think these stats are more useful than traditional ones. But they aren’t anywhere close to perfect, and I find it ironic that they are treated like gospel as much as they seem to be, considering that they were developed in part to refute people who say “North Carolina sucks at defense; look at all the points they give up!” It’s funny to me that KenPom numbers seem to be given a pass on skepticism.
Rather than respond to each post that responded to me, I’m going to put all responses in this one. That way, I can jump back and forth and post my responses in something resembling a logical argument.
This comment might be a good place to start:
“I wouldn’t care if their defensive results were a byproduct of them hypnotizing the other team it is still good defense, even if their success is largely due to athleticism.”
You should care. Let’s pretend for a minute that North Carolina’s only defensive skill is that they can hypnotize their opponent. What happens when they come up against a team who is immune to hypnosis?
My argument is that Carolina’s pace acts the same way as hypnosis to falsely inflate their defensive stats. It works against most teams, but there are teams that won’t be “hypnotized,” because they possess poised and experienced guards, because they prefer to play at that fast pace as well, or both.
There’s nothing wrong with relying heavily on pace to help you defensively. But unless you are technically sound defensively, you’re not going to be good enough on that end of the court to be truly elite.
What do I mean by being technically sound defensively? Like offensive basketball, defensive basketball has fundamentals. Rotating to the open man is one I mentioned in my first post. Carolina gave Ohio St. a ton of open looks. That the Buckeyes couldn’t knock them down – and the reason why – isn’t important in the final discussion, because UNC is eventually going to run into a team that will hit those shots. Unless you’re forcing difficult shots – rushed shots due to defensive pressure, shots with a hand in the shooters face – you shouldn’t be satisfied with your defensive performance. Anything else is being results-oriented. If Carolina played a great three-point shooting team like Butler and decided that the best way to defend the Bulldogs was to pack everyone into the key and let them shoot jumpers, you wouldn’t praise the Heels’ defense even if Butler missed all their shots. You’d say that they got lucky that their opponent had an uncharacteristically poor shooting day.
Ohio St. may have missed good looks because they felt harried by the pace of the game, but there are teams who won’t be.
Another defensive skill is hedging on ball screens. This is something that Duke’s Kyle Singler does extremely well. When his man sets a screen on the man guarding the ball, Singler comes around to the side of the screen and forces the ballhandler to dribble laterally while his teammate catches up. If he decides to switch onto the ballhandler, he recognizes his height advantage and speed disadvantage, and takes a step back, without squaring his shoulders to the ballhandler. Instead, he’s at a slight angle -- always close enough to bother a shot, far enough way that he won’t get dribbled by – funneling the dribbler into the teeth of the defense.
The Carolina bigs don’t do this well. Incidentally, neither did Shelden Williams when he was at Duke. No one seemed to take advantage of it, but you could get Williams in foul trouble simply by sending the man Williams was guarding to set a screen on the ball; Williams always jumped them too far. It seemed like every game he was always getting whistled for one blocking foul by being stupidly over-aggressive hedging a screen.
“Your anecdotal evidence regarding defensive rotation is a perfect example of exactly what this article means to disprove – you don’t have to play a slow, grinding game to defend well.”
First, I think you mean that the article means to prove that you don’t have to play a slow, grinding game to defend well. That said, rotating well defensively or hedging ball screens properly has nothing to do with playing at a certain pace. Rotating well is good defense, at any tempo; leaving men open for good shots is bad defense at any tempo.
You also asked me to support my argument with something other than “I don’t agree.” I hope you see that the kinds of examples I’ve given are and were my attempt to do that.
One poster said he agreed with my general point, but disagreed with my reasoning for specific losses. He said that Carolina “had trouble containing dribble penetration.” That sounds like a great example of bad defense to me.
Speaking of my hypothesis for why Carolina lost certain games, a few of you took exception to that:
“There is a pretty big selection bias, as you are picking games they lost and then explaining why that team showed UNC had a bad defense.”
That’s not what I was doing. I was offering my hypothesis for why Carolina lost to certain teams that were hardly elite – that they are a fundamentally average defensive team whose pace of play masks that technical deficiency.
tarheeljks noted that “4 of the games UNC lost last year (Virginia Tech, Georgia Tech, N.C. State, and Maryland), were on the road, where KenPom concedes that the Heels were much weaker defensively.”
I can’t think of a good reason why a team would play significantly poorer defense on the road than they do at home. It’s not like baseball, where if you’re playing at Fenway or whatever they call Houston’s park now there are all these weird conditions you have to get used to. It’s the same court, the same ball. Sure, the home team may shoot a little bit better because the surroundings are familiar, but that only should really matter on open looks. If you’ve got a hand in a guy’s face or are forcing him to shoot a shot he doesn’t want to take, it’s just as hard to make it at home as it is on the road.
I think that the home/road discrepancy might come back to that pace thing. As we’ve already discussed, Carolina’s defense is effective if the opposition allows itself to be rattled by an unfamiliar, uptempo game. If you’re already feeling rushed, the crowd can play a big role in enhancing that feeling. On the road, when the crowd isn’t behind North Carolina to further bother the opponent, their defense suffers.
Finally, “I’m interested to hear what you think this stat is missing regarding defensive performance.”
My inability to eloquently answer this question has probably been the biggest reason I’ve now written more than 2,000 words on the topic of Carolina’s defense – if I could explain it well, I don’t know that I’d need all this other stuff.
Here’s my best attempt. KenPom’s stats are pace-adjusted, but what they don’t adjust for is the EFFECT that playing at a certain pace has. Points-per-possession stats treat every possession exactly the same: it has the value of 1. That’s why I wanted to see these stats for individual games; it’s my belief that Carolina’s defensive points-per-possession stats would be significantly worse in games against decent opponents whose preferred style is also uptempo.
I haven’t the slightest idea how to incorporate something like this into a statistic, or if it’s even possible. And like I’ve said all along, I think these stats are more useful than traditional ones. But they aren’t anywhere close to perfect, and I find it ironic that they are treated like gospel as much as they seem to be, considering that they were developed in part to refute people who say “North Carolina sucks at defense; look at all the points they give up!” It’s funny to me that KenPom numbers seem to be given a pass on skepticism.
posted by H.S. Slam, Ph.D at 1:21 AM
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