D'Angelo Russell Discussion: Adopting A Professional Attitude

Russell has played solidly this season. He is showing progress. He still has stinkers and isn't particularly efficient with his shot but whatever...he is moving in the right direction, slowly but surely.

 

They already got LeBron
Magic didn’t believe in Russell, and that’s fine. He was probably wrong, but he followed his evidence.

 

Brooklyn. They love Atkinson. I still don’t have a sense of what they think of Eagle

 

There was a laughing emoji in there at the end.

 

Ran into a buzz saw. By the way, Marcus Smart's defensive stats are absolutely insane.

The best DRPM by a PG is Smart at 2.42. Second place is 1.72. DRPM is dominated by bigs. In the top 25, there are 12 Centers (Zubac at 25), 8 PFs, 3 SFs, zero SGs, and just one PG - Smart.

 

I think three things are important here -

First, it may be that bigs do more to keep players from scoring easily than smaller players do. This is a limited defense of the raw DRPM stats.
Second, I'm pointing out how astronomically different his number is from other PGs. Lonzo Ball is 16th-ranked among PGs at 0.20. From first to 16th, that dropoff is insane. Smart's a ridiculously good PG defender, at least by this metric.
Third, yeah; a single defensive metric is so hard. I guess you could run five SFs out there and defend reasonably well, but no one has thought it wise to put five Cs or even five PGs out there for various reasons.

BTW, my positional effciency ratings (the weighted calculations, based on Scoring, Passing, and Hustle) that I use actually employ different weights by position because of this fact. Bigs still tend to score better in my system, and wings tend to score lower. Like, if a big can't score 80 in my system, they're not very good on offense; if a SG can score 80, they're a good to very good offensive player.