Defensive Scoresheet: UK vs Ole Miss

Here is the defensive scoresheet for the Ole Miss game.  Check here for an explanation of what this is.

In the ongoing attempt to make these sheets as understandable as possible I've decided to go through the line for one of UK's players and give a more complete explanation for each category and what they tell us about his defensive game.  This time, Terrence Jones is up because he was the only Cat to be involved in every category this game.  I've also included the formulas for the calculations for those who are interested in seeing the work behind the results.

I apologize in advance for being rather long winded, but I did want to try and explain things as thoroughly as possible.  The full tables are at the end, but here is Jones' line for the game, starting with the tracked numbers:

• Defensive rebounds and blocks are pretty self explanatory.  Perhaps most memorably, Jones blocked Chris Warren twice in succession during the first half, the second time putting the ball out of bounds.  After a media timeout, Ole Miss committed an unforced turnover on a sloppy pass.
• While Terrence was on the court he accounted for 9.5 missed shots, either solo or in tandem with a teammate.  Actually, Jones personally forced 8 missed shots and combined with a teammmate (in order: Hood, Harrellson, and Liggins) on another 3 (splitting credit for each combo miss).  This has been an early trend in these score sheets as Jones forced 8.5 misses against Georgia and 8 against South Carolina.
• Terrence was also scored against 5.5 times, with the 0.5 from a shot in which Lamb was also involved.  This was the highest mark on the team, which says as much about Ole Miss going inside as anything.
• All told, Jones was involved in 19 of Ole Miss's 63 shots either solo or with a teammate (total shots not shown).  This too has been an early trend as Terrence gets himself involved on the defensive end.  Part of that is related to him defending near the basket a lot, but he gets out on the perimeter a fair share.  I think this is an aspect of Jones' game that might not get enough attention - he gets involved in defending a lot of shots and far more often then not he forces the opponent to miss.
• Moving on, we see that sent guys to the line a couple of times.  Actually both times were "and 1" opportunities for the opponent.
• Steals are pretty straightforward, but he also had 1 deadball forced turnover.  Turnovers are nice of course since they get the ball back without allowing the opponent to score.  There's no trend here so far, as Jones was excellent against USC (3.83 forced TOs) but rather "blah" against UGA (0.5).  You will also see he had one deflection which matches what he has done in each of the last two games.

Now let's take a closer look at the calculated totals.  I've added a couple of columns that I hadn't included the previous two games for space reasons:

• Stops are pretty straightforward: a stop occurs when Kentucky gets the ball back without allowing a score.  They are a combination of forcing turnovers and rebounding missed shots and missed free throws.  In this case Jones is estimated to have contributed 9.8 stops to UK's team effort.  The .8 might seem strange, but it's a consquence of how Dean Oliver approached defense by splitting results among the whole team.  Jones has been amoung the team leaders in stops in each of the last three games.
• DScPoss are Defensive Scoring Possessions or basically the opposite of stops.  This is an estimate of the number of times that Ole Miss scored that Jones was directly involved in.  Jones also leads the team in this category but again it's still a smaller number than his stops.
• DPoss are Defensive Possessions used or just the total of Stops and Def. Scoring Poss.  While every player who is on the court is involved to some degree in every defensive possession, these are the possessions for which Jones was directly involved for either the good (a stop) or the bad (a score).  In light of the previous two categories it is not surprising that Jones leads the team here.
• Stop% is just the percentage of time that Jones stopped his man from scoring, in this case 62% of his direct defensive involvement resulted in a stop.  This is not the highest mark on the team, but when you combine it with his 37 minutes played it looks pretty good.  It's also 3 % points better than the overall mark which can be seen below (in the Box Score line).
• %TmDPoss is % of Team Defensive Possessions.  This is the % of the team's defensive possessions used while a player on the floor as opposed to DPoss which is the raw total (it's sort of like FG% versus FG attempts).  Since there are 5 players on the floor at all times, a hypothetical perfectly balanced defense would have each player at 20% (0.2).  So while Jones is on the floor he is directly involved in 25% of UK's defensive stands.
• Def Rtg is Defensive Rating.  It's an attempt at something like ERA for individual players.  Oliver links a player's Def Rtg to the team's defensive rating since the team rating is the combined result of all the players and can be known exactly.  The rating itself represents the points per possession allowed by an individual and is then scaled by 100 to make it look nice.  The scaling effect is similar to how ERA is scaled by 9 innings.  In this case, Jones' overall rating was slightly better than the team's rating for the game (found in the box score line).

 Some conclusions and a question for the group.

What we see here is that Jones was really involved defensively.  He defended a lot of shots and while he was scored against several times, he forced a miss almost twice as many times as he gave one up (Ole Miss had a 36.7 FG% against Terrence).  Jones also got involved in other ways, forcing 2 turnovers and deflecting a ball.

My question is, what is it that leads to Jones being so involved defensively?  I can think of two possible reasons:

1. Teams are going at him either to try and get him in foul trouble or because they think he is weak defensively.
2. Jones is doing a an underrated job of helping out and getting himself involved on defensive plays.

I'm not sure what the answer is, but it's something I'll be keeping my eye on in the future.

Update (9-17-2011): There used to be formulas here that were developed by Dean Oliver.  I 've never been very comfortable with them posted because Dean did the work and they are available in his book.  I decided to edit them out.  I doubt anyone will refer back to this, but here's an explanation just in case.

Update (2-07-2011) I discovered an error in the calculations that affected the calculated values.  The correct tables are below.