His defense is almost as good as Perk's presently too despite a lot of negative comments about it. DRtg for Nenad is 101 in Boston, it was 110 in OKC. DRtg for Perk this year was 99 with us. So a very minor difference between him and Perk for this stat. Playing with our guys has made an improvement in his D from that stat too.
DRtg =Defensive Rating (available since the 1977-78 season in the NBA); for players and teams it is points allowed per 100 posessions.
How about the passing from him too? That was a sweet pass to Ray Allen from the high post for the three point play. I also liked the catch of the deflected pass.
I don't think defensive rating is a particularly reliable stat for individual players. For instance, according to that stat, KG is our best defensive player. No complaint there, right? Second best? Troy Murphy. Third best? Shaq. Fifth best? Semih. Um... no. Even if people want to argue for Shaq being a good overall defender despite his weakness on the pick-and-roll, there's really no way that anybody can say with a straight face that Troy Murphy and Semih Erden are / were top-five defenders on our team.
I agree. I think DRtg is a great stat but requires a lot of massaging of the data to get anything reliable out of it. Not cut and dry by any means. Examples; Shaq has a good DRtg primarily of time spent on the court with KG (around 400 of his 730 minutes). Ray Allen pulls a 103 which seems pretty good, except the team's rating is 99.9 and he is tied for the worst on the team.
On a side note, Avery Bradley has 119 mins -1.5 PER and a 59 ORtg. Even with injuries I'm not sure he should be on the team. He needs D-League experience in a bad way.