Sunday evening, I began a new basketball project: tracking individual defensive stats for the Toronto Raptors.  It began in the loosest of senses when I attended the Raps/Pacers game on the 15th, spilled over to the stat boards, continued on with a Thunder game and then at last took legitimate form as I watched the Raptors outlast the Bulls in an overtime game this past Sunday.  

Borrowing liberally from a study begun by Schuyler Davis; some of his work is published over at basketball-statistics.com.  The basic method is, at least for now, strikingly similar to the one Mr. Davis used.  The details of his method can be found here.  

Essentially, I looked at a host of defensive events discretely and recorded when a player either failed notably or played especially good defense.  Average events were not recorded, nor would one person be reasonably capable of recording all of those anyway, bearing in mind that there are basically five defensive events happening on every possession.  

It is worth mentioning that though I performed a trial chart against the Thunder, this was my first full-game chart.  There are assuredly many errors, and some subjective judgments that need to be refined and clarified for the next time that I chart a game.  It is also true that I am working on finding a more objective way to quantify the results of the game, but in the meantime, the collection of this raw data is an important step to better understanding individual and team defense in a more effective manner than we do now, especially given how clumsy most defensive metrics are.  

In any case, I will continue to refine the process as I go along, but for now, the results were still interesting.  Bearing in mind that they represent a single-game (and thus very small) sample, the numbers did at least match with the general consensus of Raptors fans: Jose Calderon is not a good defender.  Beyond that, the Raptors appeared to play decent defense and the Bulls hit a lot of contested shots (Ben Gordon in particular).  

In the first half, Toronto sent Chris Bosh over to help every time Derrick Rose got a screen up at the top of the circle and that kept him in check, but once Ben Gordon started putting pressure on the Raptors (he scored only 9 of his 37 points in the first half and only 18 after three quarters), Bosh had other concerns to worry about and Rose was free to attack Calderon in isolation, a match-up decidedly in Chicago?s favor.  Rose himself had only 7 of his 23 points after three quarters and erupted on Toronto thereafter.  The guard play of the Bulls was nearly too much for Toronto to handle and Chicago?s offense was quite potent, outscoring the Raptors by 13 in the fourth quarter, only to let things slip away in OT because of Rose?s missed layup and the general ineptitude of Tyrus Thomas, who bricked a 16-footer and a 19-footer, his only contributions to the OT period besides a defensive rebound.  

Returning to the defensive stats, I was looking at a series of specific events.  In particular, I tracked isolation defensive coverage, pick-and-rolls, help rotations/recoveries, contested defensive rebounds and transition defense.  In the case of all but the latter, I tracked a positive and negative category.  With transition defense, since the opportunities for positive events were so prolific, I only tracked negative events and there were very few, mostly because a player got fouled with no call and fell down (or flopped and fell down) and the Raps were short-handed as a result.  

The biggest problem, I found, was choosing whether to record pick-and-roll coverages by the help defender in the pick-and-roll category or the help rotation category.  I unconsciously recorded several such events in different columns, so that is definitely something I have to fix the next time around by making a clear choice one way or the other.

The second biggest problem was determining how much was coaching strategy and how much was the players themselves.  Before the game, Coach Jay Triano did talk a little about how he planned to play Derrick Rose and you could see it in the first half before Ben Gordon disabused them of the notion that focusing on Rose and not him was the best plan.  

Once both got going, well, the Raptors couldn?t really do anything because they have but two players who are decent perimeter defenders against guys under 6?5 and those are Parker and Roko.  Both did a reasonable job, but it?s difficult to contain that kind of athleticism without a shot-blocker, so we got to see the upside of running two small, athletic guards against a defensive line such as Toronto fielded.  The Raptors seemed to design their possessions so that Marion tried to guard Rose, but that was a mistake, and one not much better than if Calderon had been left on Rose.  Bosh found himself guarding Gordon in isolation sets repeatedly in the second half and as you can see, that did not work out well at all, though on the possession where Gordon tied the game at the regulation buzzer, Bosh had indeed played him well straight up; Gordon just hit a long J in his face.  

So, the basic assumption that Calderon is a poor individual defender was borne out.  The demise of Anthony Parker?s defense seems a little presumptuous after watching that game and the Raptors as a team didn?t look bad on many possessions.  It was rather stunning to see that in such a high-scoring game, the player doing the most damage was doing it in spite of the defense as opposed to on account of its absence.  The Raptors dominated the glass, holding advantages at either end of the floor but the Bulls hit a lot of long jumpers until basically the fourth quarter and overtime, at which point the combined scoring threat of Gordon and Rose was too much for the defense to handle and the lead, as much as 17 points in the fourth quarter, wilted with incredible alacrity.  

This proved to be an interesting exercise.  As the project progresses, it?ll be interesting to establish a baseline performance level for each of the Raptors players and to be able to compare their performance against specific kinds of offense and see where the Raptors strengths and weaknesses lie in a more particular sense than ?athletic guards with jumpers and power-post players,? as is essentially the case for all but the most elite defensive squads.  After that, it will become interesting to see how effectively this data can be applied to player assessment models and perhaps some kind of ?alternate box score? rating metric, perhaps.  

Until next time.