But it does speak to something that's been on my mind, Brick: you pay a lot of lip service to defense, but it doesn't seem to factor too heavily into your grades, at least not relative to offensive production. I'm kind of perplexed that you gave Thompson his second-best grade of the season for last night, when I kind of felt like it was the worst game he's played this year.
Do you know what the hardest part of grading defense is?
It's whether you decide to grade the result or the effort.
Offense is easy to grade because it's easy to quantify.
For instance, when Rudy goes 5-25 we say he had a poor offensive night and give him a corresponding poor grade.
Now it could be that he was going against an elite SF defender such as Paul George or LBJ, but if he decides to jack up 25 shots then the expectation is that he should be shooting with the idea that he'll be making these baskets at a good clip...so if he misses a lot, that is all on him.
Defense on the other hand is a whole other animal.
Lets say that Collison is guarding Tony Parker and Parker in the course of the game beats Collison off the dribble and gets to the rack 10 times but misses all of his flips going 0-10.
Then in another game Parker gets to the basket 10 times and this time scores 5 times, gets to the line 3 more times putting 2 fouls on Cousins and 1 foul on JT, scoring a combined 16 points.
In one situation Parker is not being effective on the offensive end because he's 'off' while the next time he's killing us inside....same defense just different results.
Then you have the situation where you play great defense and it's a matter of better offense overcoming great defense.
What if you have Collison playing Steph Curry perfectly, contesting every shot, getting into his air space, not letting him get penetration, and Curry is just hitting everything off one leg falling away from the outside going 12-16?
Is it poor defense even if you got lit up for 28 points on 75% shooting just because the guy you were guarding couldn't miss even if you blindfolded him and chained his feet together?
Finally you don't really know what the defensive schemes are. You can guess what the coach is asking...but if a player is making the same 'mistake' (like leaving his man on the perimeter) over and over again...is it really a mistake or what the coach is asking for? We can't know for certain.
Anyway, defense is just harder to grade because of the items above. It doesn't mean that it can't be quantified properly, but there is one other item to factor.
When you have the consortium grading you have different people grading different players each and every night so you're never going to get true consistency especially on the defensive end.
I think for players like JT, Ben, Evans, & Casspi the defense happens to be a bigger part of the grade because there isn't the expectation that they will be carrying the offensive.
But one grader might give a better grade due to the 'effort' while another grader might downgrade the score due to the 'result', defense is just harder to quantify consistently.
When grading I would say that it normally takes me around an hour-and-a-half to properly go through all the film, review the stats, and put together my thoughts on the grades...and that is usually only for two players.
It's staggering to think about the amount of time and effort Bricklayer has put into doing these grades by himself over the last decade...especially considering how unwatchable this team has been over these dark years...when all you really had to watch was player development and the hope that someday it would translate into winning team basketball.
Bricklayer is very concerned about consistency by the Grading Consortium and though we try there is always going to be room for improvements and I'm OK with that.
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