Knicks are Warriors should get a lot of credit for Brunson and Curry not being on this list

Yeah they switched everything. It was pesronnel and coaching

How can you hide him when they insist on playing him with bbq reaves. He’ll be better then letting reaves get cooked

He had a league average defensive rating of 113 and was leading scorer of the league and should of been MVP with 33 8 8. I don’t think he needed to be hidden.

They have it already last 2 years with Luka there now

Shrink the floor, closer in gap, let ops shoot 3 but no easy penetration. You noticed that if luka got picked on, the closest guy will slide more toward Luka immediately than usual spot

Teams start to notice though but not many teams happy to bomb 3s most of the time. Good defense to compensate lack of defensive talents

And Luka is never going to be able to do the uhh show and recover like Brunson does.

Good thing they have one of the worst defensive rosters of all time this season to balance it out lmao

Yeah, because targeting Luka was simply about tiring him out, nothing else. Lol. 😂

The problem with this stat is it counts the closest defender as the primary, so if Luka gets blown by and someone else meets the offensive player at the rim it doesn’t affect Luka’s percentage. DFG% just means you were close by when a guy took a shot and they either made it or missed, it’s not really a good metric for non big men.

Him and Reaves are at 48.6% on 30 attempts a game. The gap between Luka and 2nd for attempts is so large that it’s not even within the top 10. Kessler will have low shot attempts against him simply because teams will want to run their offense around attacking Luka and Reaves. But surely you don’t think Luka and Reaves are as good on defense as Hart/Barnes/White.

He has been statistically average defensively for most of his career and his last years for the Mavs they had one of the best defenses in the league, but I guess that the glued together lowlights are too convincing for a lot of people.

Those are only the attempts where he defended the shot. It doesn’t include all the times they gave up an open shot because the defense was in rotation after Luka got blown-by.

not to mention…of course small fast guards will target a large and less agile guard…with zero backup behind him

my buddy’s team did the same to their star guard last season

It’s not just tiring him out, but also trying to get him in foul trouble if he tries to play defense. For some reason people want offensive superstars to defend without fouling in TODAY’S NBA!

Luka is too gifted an offensive player to ever risk him having to leave the game because of foul trouble. That’s why you don’t expect him to be a physical defender, and let him use his bbiq to jump passing lanes and create turnovers. If the opposition wants to target him on switches and play one-one, you either double or let Luka play it safe and don’t contest.

People expect way too much from game breaking talents. There have been multiple MVPS who couldn’t or wouldn’t play defense, and I’d take Luka’s defense over someone like Steve Nash. Some of yall talk like he’s a traffic cone, when he’s an average defender, who could be better if he wasn’t the best offensive weapon in basketball with an insane usage rate.

he’s also white on offense

Are you blind? Derrick White is significantly better when looking at this. Plus unlike Luka, Boston wants White to let players drive against him so that they won’t give up a 3 knowing that White would force them to shoot inefficient middies.

Well, this is saying he’s on par with Barnes since they have identical DFG%. White is significantly better at 43.1% (best on this list)

This was the Knicks strategy against Wemby too. By the third quarter dude was gassed every game. He’s unstoppable only as long as he can keep his breath.

That’s normally why you try to get, you know, a good bench.

Hmm, so why didn’t teams apply the same strategy to his peers who also carry the offensive load like Ant or Cade?

Bc those guys are actually good defenders. Luka is not a good defender. He’s a pretty lazy one and idk why ppl have a hard time admitting that.

Ppl target him because he’s the path of least resistance

He’s not a bad defender, he’s basically always been league average, or a little above.

He has the same issue that Harden had where the lowlights look bad and paint a picture of him not “trying hard” or just “standing around” based on his demeanor when he was playing in the Maverick’s defensive scheme, when it was really about him being too important on offense to rack up fouls on low-percentage closeouts in the paint. There were a lot of instances where Tim Hardaway (one of the worst defenders in the league) would get absolutely cooked on the perimeter or lose his man, and give up an open lane to the basket or a pass to a guy in the dunker spot. Then, instead of make a contest that would likely result in giving a foul, Luka would just let the guy score, because it was more important to the team that Luka not get in foul trouble.

You are reading way too much into dfg which is an extremely crude metric lol

If he didn’t try, then he either would have lower DFGA (meaning he gives up on plays) or higher DFG% (meaning his contests are weak or very late). In contrast, DFGA is already league leading and DFG% is roughly league average.

It doesn’t mean that at all. The issue is that publicly available defensive stats are terrible.

If you get completely blown by, your DFG% is actually passed onto the defender behind who comes to help, because he’s technically the guy who gets scored on.

We’ve seen these stats before. In the lead up to the 2024 finals, r/nba was flooded with stats showing Luka’s defence was passable.

Except the paid-for stats showed the opposite. Luka was 1st, 2nd and 3rd for “The highest blow-by percentage allowed on drives in a series in the last 10 years”.

edit: For the person who responded and then blocked. The stat comes from Second Spectrum’s tracking data, an LA based company. It used to be available for free, but now they sell their data direct to NBA teams.

It’s not a psy-op from Bill Simmons lol.

The biggest issue I have with people mocking his defense, is his offense is so next level, that you can’t risk him getting in foul trouble, and since he’s a big guy that guards wings, it looks bad when he gives up free dunks, but how is that any different than Jokic or Nash? These players control the offense and entire flow of the game, so the opposing team wins if they remove them from the floor.

You can’t play good defense without being physical and aggressive, and when you play that way, you will usually be in danger of picking up fouls, unless you play for OKC. They’re too important to the game plan to risk dumb fouls, and Luka isn’t a complete turnstile, like some past MVPs who didn’t even play in this foul crazy era where everything gets called

virtually the same as Scottie Barnes and Josh Hart

Or Doncic is as good a defender as they are

And Doncic is not a bad defender. Just average.

There is an old post about DFG% as a stat on NBAdiscussion subreddit:  https://www.reddit.com/r/nbadiscussion/comments/yqy5fk/is_dfg_a_good_metric/

“DFG% is only good within 3 feet. Outside of that, the stat gets very noisy as it counts the nearest defender, so players who are closing out on shots may allow a higher percentage even if it isn’t their fault that the defense concedes an open shot. This applies to pretty much every open shot, and as a stat that is clearly meant for isolation defense, it doesn’t distinguish between on ball and off ball defense either” 

Someone replayed:  “Even within 3 feet it’s not entirely accurate. It depends on the team scheme and what kinds of shots they are choosing to give up, are they playing drop vs hedge vs switch, etc. There’s just too much noise in “nearest defender.”

Seems like people think that it is mostly useful  to evaluate rim protection, so data about guards is not even that reliable because rim protection is usually not something they often do. 

Derrick White forces a 43.1 Fg% so his numbers show that he’s taking on aggressive scorers but they aren’t having much success which tracks his reputation and the eye test. Scottie Barnes might be an overrated defender though judging by these numbers, I haven’t watched him play much though.

White is an excellent defender, Barnes is good (his DFG% is higher because he has to defend more near the rim as he even played some small-ball 5 last season, which naturally would have higher FG%), Doncic is average - and numbers above support that.

Well, you can clearly see that D. White and Cunningham are elite defenders, with very low DFG%.
On the other hand, Scottie Barnes seems to be (by this metric) quite overhyped, and far from the elite defender he’s supposed to be.

That’s the point. They are forcing a switch onto Luka & Reeves or whoever Lukas man is guarding is attacking him because they’re bad defenders

he’s an elite defender who provides 0 rim protection or perimeter defense

Jokic defended 7.8 attempts at the rim per game, more than any other big.

This data also misses shots that Jokic(and everyone else) never got in position to defend in the first place(which I don’t think is a huge amount of attempts to be fair)

What is to be taken from this data is really just that Jokic doesn’t deter anyone from attacking the rim.

Wemby for example though is always in position, and still defended just 5.8 shots at the rim per game. As a massive deterrent, teams are clearly just terrified to attempt against him and for good reason.

Players shot just 48% at the rim against Wemby in the playoffs, by far the lowest mark of any starting big. By comparison, players shot 66% against Jokic, 64% against Gobert, and 63% against KAT. Mobley and Allen kinda supercharge each other by double defending the rim, and they still sit at ~58% each.

People forget fast, the year they went to the finals they were underdogs in every series pretty much, they were supposed to stand no chance vs neither MIN nor OKC. And yeah, some of us still remember that time when they also didn’t have a chance at all according to predictions, and dunked so hard on the #1 seed that they had to apologize to their fan base.

He really does live in new Yorkers heads 😂😂

I mean clearly you don’t watch him if you think his offense is foul baiting centric.

More predictable than the Cavs?