Measuring individual defense is hard. Recent dissections of the defensive impact of Klay Thompson and Donovan Mitchell help illustrate some of these challenges. I’m not going to claim to have an answer for how good either player is, but can hopefully shed some light on how one might go about considering the question.
While imperfect, traditional stats do a reasonably good job of describing who does what on offense, especially with the ball. However, attempting to measure defense simply by flipping the box score around and assigning credit or blame to a player’s position opposite is a pretty level-zero approach to the game. Coaches at all levels emphasize defense isn’t you stopping your individual matchup, but rather our five stopping their five.
So, we can’t readily stat count our way to a good evaluation of individual defensive contributions, and have to dig a little deeper.
The examinations of Thompson and Mitchell showcase divergent approaches. Ben…
