I love me some threes. LOVE Them. It’s partly why I hate the Warriors, because all the threes belong to them.
It follows then that I’d love Ryan Anderson . . . and I do. When he was signed for a criminal 8mil per, despite being a restricted free agent, I was a bit like this guy from that excellent Anime, Hunter x Hunter.
Though . . . maybe not quite like that . . . since he was looking at a 12 year old . . . and is referred to as a child kill-ester by my son . . . Um, let’s just move on! (It is a good show though!)
Like Graham McQueen posted a couple months ago, there are a lot of reasons we should be excited about Ryan Anderson and his potential in Alvin Gentry’s system. There is, however, a dark side to Ryan Anderson you simply can’t escape:
He makes your defense suck. Like really, really bad. Like awful. Like tire-fire bad.
You take the team’s big five of Asik-Davis-Evans-Gordon-Holiday, and replace Asik with Anderson and the offense gets 9 points per 100 possessions better. That’s huge as far as impact goes. The team’s defense? It gets 17 points per 100 possessions worse. For those of you not good at math, that’s huger.
Anderson is essentially taking a top 10 defense, lighting it on fire, and replacing it with the Knicks . . . without Carmelo. And this issue is consistent across the board. Insert Anderson for Asik in a line-up with Davis-Pondexter-Gordon-Evans, and the offense gets 11.5 pp100 better and the defense gets 14 pp100 worse. In the end, you won’t find a single line-up with Anderson in it that even approaches average defensively.
In addition, if you go to NBA.com’s stats tool and look at the worst opponent fg% at the rim for players who
A. Defended more than 5 attempts at the rim per game, and
B. Played 24 mpg in at least 25 games
you get:
- Enes Kanter (UTA) 57.3%
- Enes Kanter (Total) 56.9%
- Nikola Pekovic (Min) 56.5%
- Enes Kanter (OKC) 56.4%
- Gorgui Dieng (Min) 55.8%
- Jordan Hill (LAL) 55.4%
- Ryan Anderson (NOP) 55.4%
In other words, he’s almost as bad as all three versions of Enes Kanter – a guy who is hated by advanced defensive metrics so badly that he is panned as one of the worst deals this off-season, despite being a near lock for a 20-10 statline. Sheesh.
Therefore, I propose that we no longer include Ryan Anderson as a part of the teams Big Five. Asik, whose line-up numbers are stellar, should now take that honor. Who is with me?
. . .
At least until Ryan Anderson hits a couple threes, then screw all that defense noise.
(You’ll notice I called it the Big five, and not the Finishing Five like McNamara does. Because, you know, Asik has trouble finishing.
. . .
That sounds bad. Let’s just end this column now before things get more weird.)
9 responses to “Mining the Numbers: The Dark Side of Ryan Anderson”
Just gotta hope with a better defensive scheme his defense goes up. It wasn’t that bad in Orlando was it?
Isn’t what you are really saying is that Anderson should come off the bench and play against at least some 2nd team players? Then his defense might not be as much of a liability AND his offensive number will be even better.
jmsunseri Good Question! I went and looked up the Orlando data – and while Anderson was a part of a few defenses that were better than average, there is one overarching fact. Anderson was a starter the last season he was there. The year before Orlando had the 3rd ranked defense when Anderson played 22 minutes and Rashard Lewis soaked up minutes there for half the season. The next season, Anderson played 33 minutes a game and started – and the team’s defense was ranked 12th.
There are a lot of caveats to that season – it was lockout shortened, Hedo started to decline, Brandon Bass also left and was replaced by headcase Earl Clark. Dwight started to lose his mind.
The fact remains the defense went elite to average when Anderson started.
Gents! Any chance I can request a schedule breakdown/analysis podcast?
You have a typo right below the Hisoka picture…. (It is a good show though!)
It should say (It is the best show!)
SydSider Probably not going to happen soon. I’m going to be traveling for a couple weeks.
Jimb0 nice.
ryanschwan SydSider No worries at all. Safe travels. If your heading to Australia, let me know, love to shout you guys a drink for all the work you do.
Analytics are nice – and Ryno’s D-RPM for last season was horrific, but anyone watching games closely last year could clearly see that he had almost no foots peed, almost no lateral mobility. His one semi-D move was to bounce the ball hard after he retrieved from the net after getting beat once again. In addition his D rebounding was off-the-charts bad last season as well — a factor in our historic 4th qrtr collapse in game 3 vs GSW (where he had 0 D boards the entire 2nd half). Enough . . .