Using Numbers to Talk About Offense and Defense

Greg M. Cooper-USA TODAY Sports I’m going to start this article with the motivating tweet.

I think we can all agree that Joel Embiid is one of the very best defensive players in the league. It’s not a particularly debatable point. What I want to do is add some clarity on ways to use or not use common advanced-ish stats.

Defensive Rating

I’ll be using the official NBA.com definition of defensive rating (DRTG), which is “[t]he number of points allowed per 100 possessions by a team. For a player, it is the number of points per 100 possessions that the team allows while that individual player is on the court”.

I hate to assign homework, but check out this table for context, which is the league…