Interesting Article: D'Antoni - Defensive Genius?

[PosImpos]

http://www.basketballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=514

I was reading through the Knicks season previews posted on the front page, and one of the articles led me to this article, which I found pretty interesting.  It posits that a large part of D'Antoni's success might have been his defensive strategies combined with gifted offensive players, which runs contrary to the prevailing belief that he is an offensive genius who doesn't encourage his players to even bother on defense.

[Fan from VT]

Funny, Hollinger was writing the same thing while D'Antoni was in Phoenix. As all the talking heads were just spouting the same old "Phoenix is bad at defense, look at all the point they give up!" line, Hollinger was writing about how of course the Suns games are high scoring, they take and give up a ton of shots because they play so fast. But defense isn't about how many points you give up per game, it's how many points you give up per opposing possesion, and D'Antoni's teams are pretty good at that, there's just a lot of possessions.

[Roy Hobbs]

The point generally made is that you can't just look at points per game to determine a good defense.  Instead, you need to look at this like FG% allowed, and most importantly, points allowed per 100 possessions.  This evaluates defense on a per possession, rather than per game, basis, which better accounts for things such as the pace of a given game.

Here's how the Suns fared under D'Antoni:

Year	Pts per Game (Rank)	Pts per 100 Poss (Rank)	Pace Factor Rank
'04-'05	103.3 (30th)	107.1 (17th)	1st
'05-'06	102.8 (28th)	105.8 (16th)	1st
'06-'07	102.9 (23rd)	106.4 (13th)	3rd
'07-'08	105.0 (25th)	108.1 (16th)	4th

As you can see, the Suns always ranked near the bottom of the league in terms of points allowed, but they were middle of the road in terms of defensive efficiency per 100 possessions.  The defense wasn't great, but it wasn't terrible, either.

Interesting, under Porter / Gentry, it's when things got really bad:

Year	Pts per Game (rank)	Pts per 100 poss (rank)	Pace Factor Rank
'08-'09	107.5 (27th)	111.6 (26th)	4th

I think there's at least some evidence that D'Antoni doesn't get the credit he deserves in terms of his defensive schemes.