03-26-2021, 12:02 PM
I looked for a Richardson thread to add this to and couldn’t find it. Sorry.
Reading Kam’s take that Josh has made the Mavs worse on D motivated me to look at some numbers. And I’ve posted them below for whatever they’re worth. I get that Kam is great with data (even though there are limits to the value of things like on/off numbers, which he readily admits). But just calling my sense of Richardson’s defensive contributions the “eye test” seems to overly trivialize it. So I figured I would bring something more than mere opinion to support my take that Josh has been PRECISELY what this team needed on D. Here goes:
Devin Booker vs. Mavs
This season: 22 pts, 24 (2.1 below season average of 25.1)
Last season: 18, 32, 30, 27 (0.2 above season average of 26.6)
Jamal Murray vs. Mavs
This season: 21, 16, 10 (5.4 below season average of 21.1)
Last season: 16, 14, 25 (0.3 above season average of 18.5)
Dame Lilliard vs. Mavs
This season: 34, 31, 19 (2.0 below season average of 30.0)
Last season: 28, 34, 47, 61 (12.5 above season average of, again, 30.0)
I tried to find other examples but Donovan Mitchell hasn’t played against the Mavs this year, Zach Lavine has only 3 games against us over the past 2 years, with his only big outing during Josh’s Covid recovery. Others had switched teams and didn’t seem like comparable comparisons. So these seemed like the best fits for what I wanted to test. And all 3 tell the same story: Richardson’s D keeps elite guards from going ballistic on the Mavs, making us far less vulnerable defensively than we were last season.
And that’s exactly what I thought I was seeing. Guards don’t regularly have career outings vs. this version of your Dallas Mavericks like they so often have in the past.
Now, bigs? That’s a different story. It seems like powerful interior players are still having their way with us, more so than last year even. Whether there are numbers to support that take is a topic for another day. But if there are, then I suspect this has more to do with the declining defensive rating numbers that Kam keeps referencing. And Josh is not the cause of that.
Reading Kam’s take that Josh has made the Mavs worse on D motivated me to look at some numbers. And I’ve posted them below for whatever they’re worth. I get that Kam is great with data (even though there are limits to the value of things like on/off numbers, which he readily admits). But just calling my sense of Richardson’s defensive contributions the “eye test” seems to overly trivialize it. So I figured I would bring something more than mere opinion to support my take that Josh has been PRECISELY what this team needed on D. Here goes:
Devin Booker vs. Mavs
This season: 22 pts, 24 (2.1 below season average of 25.1)
Last season: 18, 32, 30, 27 (0.2 above season average of 26.6)
Jamal Murray vs. Mavs
This season: 21, 16, 10 (5.4 below season average of 21.1)
Last season: 16, 14, 25 (0.3 above season average of 18.5)
Dame Lilliard vs. Mavs
This season: 34, 31, 19 (2.0 below season average of 30.0)
Last season: 28, 34, 47, 61 (12.5 above season average of, again, 30.0)
I tried to find other examples but Donovan Mitchell hasn’t played against the Mavs this year, Zach Lavine has only 3 games against us over the past 2 years, with his only big outing during Josh’s Covid recovery. Others had switched teams and didn’t seem like comparable comparisons. So these seemed like the best fits for what I wanted to test. And all 3 tell the same story: Richardson’s D keeps elite guards from going ballistic on the Mavs, making us far less vulnerable defensively than we were last season.
And that’s exactly what I thought I was seeing. Guards don’t regularly have career outings vs. this version of your Dallas Mavericks like they so often have in the past.
Now, bigs? That’s a different story. It seems like powerful interior players are still having their way with us, more so than last year even. Whether there are numbers to support that take is a topic for another day. But if there are, then I suspect this has more to do with the declining defensive rating numbers that Kam keeps referencing. And Josh is not the cause of that.