Still, the lateral quickness and quick elevation allow him to stay with James and block the shot.Īgain, that’s just one example. You can see he’s quick laterally, but James probably could have driven by him into help if he so chose. Amir Johnson is coming to help but never needs to, as Gay manages to force James wide and elevates for a block. I also didn’t want to take any Synergy video, and am not exactly tech-savvy in terms of creating videos (please trust me that I watched a bunch of Grizzlies end-game situations via my League Pass account in the past week, and I’m not blowing smoke up your butts).īelow, however, is a good example of Gay’s isolation defense. Of course, that would be cherry-picking, but so would any videos showing him as a poor defender. Now, beyond all of these stats, I wanted to clip some video to show as well. from HoopChalk, Hardwood Paroxysm and more, pulled Gay’s 2011-12 numbers for me. To try and dig deeper, Jared Dubin, a true O.G. I am almost positive this is because Gay guards tougher players than any one particular Raptor has been tasked with, in concert with some curious classification by Synergy for non one-on-one situations. If you’ve ever accused me of cherry-picking stats to prove my point, hopefully the fact that Gay’s overall opponent point per possession here is the worst of the bunch puts that to rest. We also see that Terrence Ross, likely because of his length and quickness, is excellent guarding spot-up shooters. In addition we see that DeRozan has done better than Anderson and Gay in isolation, which we can all agree is DEFINITELY because of quality of opposing players. This could be a scheme-dependent anomaly, I’m not really sure. We can still see some interesting things though, such as the fact that all the Raptor wings seem to be better handling the pick-and-roll than Gay. In addition, the logging/tracking of defenders and plays is somewhat in question, and a lot of “stats people” I trust don’t love it outside of post-ups and isolations, where the primary defender is obvious. Perhaps most importantly, though, is that these stats don’t control for the quality of the opponent being guarded.
Let’s look to Synergy, then, to identify particular situations.Ī few caveats are necessary here, mainly that we’re dealing with a relatively small sample of games and I can’t go back any further than this year (because Synergy STILL doesn’t have registration open, so I just get the “basics”). Again though, these are general stats, and some people may not love the methodology the sites use to determine them. It really doesn’t take a “stats geek” to see that using these two advanced metrics, Gay is head and shoulders above his new teammates. Part of this is due to Memphis’ strong defense and Gay’s heavy minutes load, but it’s still extremely impressive. The first thing to note is that Gay is 14th in the NBA this year in Defensive Win Shares. (Note: This table is color-scaled to this group, not to league average.) Now, advanced defensive statistics can be flawed, but if we look at enough of them over a large enough sample, we might be able to paint a clear picture. Before we get into some situation-specific information, let’s compare Gay’s defensive metrics with other Raptors. The Raptors don’t have a big as strong defensively as Gasol or another wing defender as strong as Allen, so Gay’s defense becomes even more important here in Toronto (I know Amir is a great help defender, but Gasol is getting Defensive Player of the Year love, so chill). Gay got the toughest assignment, in particular, at the end of games, which will be a key role for him in Toronto. At least this is what I gather from the video I’ve looked at and from applying logic to having Gay on the opposition’s best weapon if Allen is, in fact, the better defender. Now, Allen is still a better wing defender than Gay, but the sum of Gay-on-ball + Allen-freelance was greater than Gay-freelance + Allen-on-ball. This allowed Allen more freedom to freelance off the ball, an area where he excels. In Memphis, Tony Allen and Marc Gasol get a great deal of attention for their defensive contributions, but Gay played a “stay-at-home” kind of role, playing tight man defense on the opposing team’s best wing player. He is, however, slightly above-average and also immediately becomes the Raptors’ best wing defender. To reiterate my stance at the time of the trade, Gay is not an elite wing defender, nor is he a poor one. I had promised to dive in a little deeper sometime this week, and I’ll do that now. I came to his defense, but mostly just in passing on the Podcast or on Twitter.
When the Raptors acquired Rudy Gay last week, some people were still under the impression that he’s a poor defender.