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Basketball Statistician's Digest:
Examining Defense ~ The Defensive Four Factors

From Basketball Geek By Ryan J. Parker
Download source here: ' Examining Defense ~ Defensive Four Factors '

"... The real goal in all of this is to get an idea of how coaching and player ability affect overall defensive efficiency and the individual stats that are collected. Because of this, I will be strictly focusing on each team’s most used lineup. ..."

"... One important assumption in all of this work is the notion that a team’s goal is to minimize their defensive efficiency. A team’s true goal is to maximize their net efficiency (offensive efficiency - defensive efficiency), but we will not be focusing on this for now. ..."

"... By most used, I mean the lineup that was on the court for the most defensive possessions. To make things a little easier, I have chosen to estimate possessions instead of count them. I hope this does not prove to be a mistake, but for the interested, I used the “simple” formula for estimating possessions as defined in ..."

"... Shooting, by no surprise, has been shown to be the most important factor. This factor is often analyzed using effective FG%. I, however, am biased against effective FG%. It is not actually a percentage, and I find it to have no useful mathematical properties (that I’m aware of, at least). Thus I feel compelled to use a shooting statistic that I can make more sense out of. ..."

"... The results from this sample show that, with respect to defensive efficiency, shooting is worth 56%, turnovers 18%, rebounding 7%, and free throws 18%. It’s certainly worth gathering a larger sample to truly put some sort of importance weight on each factor, but for this sample it is at least worth looking at. ..."

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