Defense vs Position

How a club’s number is built

Start with one game. Every opposing player who played is sorted into one of five columns by his position, and his minutes, points, rebounds, assists, steals, blocks, turnovers, threes, and his field goals and free throws made and attempted are added into that column. Do that for every game the club played, divide by its games, and the figure in each cell is what that position put up against the club on an average night, all of them together: if two point guards split the minutes, both count. The fantasy points are worked out from those same totals under the table you pick. The six-stat table counts a point as one, a rebound as 1.2, an assist as 1.5, a steal or a block as three, and takes one off for a turnover; the eleven-stat table also scores every make and every miss, so a defense that forces bad shooting nights shows up there and not in the six-stat column. A percentage is never an average of nightly percentages: it is the makes over the attempts across every game in the window, which is how your league’s weekly percentage is actually computed.

Five positions, and where a player is counted

Each player is placed at his primary position in our player directory, the five-way designation the fantasy boards use, and he is counted once. A player listed at point guard and shooting guard counts at point guard; the one listed shooting guard first counts at shooting guard. The official box score lists only guard, forward or center, which cannot tell a point guard from a shooting guard, so it is not used to place anyone. Two consequences are worth knowing. First, more players are listed at the wing positions than at point guard or center, so the shooting guard and small forward columns carry more minutes every night, and their numbers are bigger for that reason alone: compare a column down the page, club against club, and never across it, position against position. Second, a player who has left the league since the games were played is no longer in the directory and has no position to be counted at. His line still counts in the All column, which is every opposing player, and the note under the board says how much of the floor that leaves out; for last season it is about one minute in twenty.

Ranks and colours

Every column is ranked across the league, and rank 1 is the softest matchup: the club that gives up the most. Turnovers are the one column turned around, because a turnover counts against your player, so rank 1 there is the club that forces the fewest. The colour on a cell is the rank’s fifth of the league: green for the six clubs that give up the most, a lighter green for the next six, no colour for the middle, gold for the six below that, and red for the six that give up the least. Minutes are shown and not ranked, because the minutes a position gets against a club are about how the floor was shared out, not about how well anyone defended it. The first row is the league line, the average club, so any cell can be read against it at a glance.

The windows

The season window is every game the club has played. The two short windows are the club’s own last ten and last five games rather than a span of days, so a club that played four games in a week and one that played three are compared over the same number of nights. Short windows are where a real change shows first, a defense that lost its best perimeter stopper in January, a center who came back from injury, and they are also where one blowout can move a number a long way. Read the games column before you read a colour. At the end of a season the last ten games include the stretch where out-of-contention clubs rest their starters, so the season window is the steadier read until the new season is a few weeks old.

What defense versus position cannot tell you

It is a description of what happened, and the honest thing to say about it is that it predicts less than it looks like it should. Modern defenses switch, so the player listed as a small forward spends half his possessions guarding somebody else. Pace inflates everything: a club that plays fast gives up more to every position, which is why the All column is there, and a club that sits near the top of all five columns is usually fast or bad rather than soft at one spot. Schedules are uneven, and a club in a division full of elite guards will look worse against guards than it is. Treat a matchup here as the tiebreaker between two players you already rate about the same, not as a reason to start a bench player over a starter. Read it beside the streamers board, which counts the games each player has in the days ahead, and the schedule planner, which counts them week by week.

Before the season, and in its first weeks

Until opening night there is no season in progress to read, so the board shows last season, says so in the band, and labels every window with the season it comes from. Once the new season starts, its games take over, but a defense judged on four games is four games, so last season rides along as its own window and is the one the board opens on until the average club has played ten. The board is rebuilt every morning before dawn Eastern, after the night’s box scores are complete. The position, the window, the points table and the column you sorted by are written into the address, so the link you copy opens the same board for whoever you send it to.

The box scores are read nightly into our own game log; the positions come from our player directory, which is refreshed through the day. If the board is unavailable the page says so rather than showing an old one.