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Message: [QUOTE="Niastri, post: 5427290, member: 722"] I appreciate your long, nuanced post about, among other things, the difficulty of quantifying defensive contributions. Even in baseball, where the new technology allows tracking of velocity, angle, and spin rates, the ability of defensive metrics to predict future ability is nebulous. Determining who is good or bad on defense in the chaos of a basketball game seems even more difficult. In the other hand, defensive metrics often are a pretty good indicator of relative values, even if exact values aren’t completely accurate. The Win Shares defensive statistic gave Starling a slight positive rating. The DBPM gave him a slight negative rating. The eye test says he’s negative, but who knows exactly what the team was trying to do, and how well Starling was doing as instructed? My gut feeling is Starling isn’t good defensively, but that his defensive woes are overstated because he doesn’t fill the stat sheet on defense. [/QUOTE]