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If Defense Wins Championships…

Posted on April 16, 2008 by atthehive

It’s been a long season, full of ups and downs, especially defensively. There’s nothing like a graph to capture the fluctuations in defensive efficiency, so I decided to make one. Graphed below is the Hornets’ defensive efficiency in 5 game intervals, the Hornets’ average defensive efficiency (the purple line), and the NBA average (the yellow line). Keep in mind that a low number is a good thing, because this means less points given up.

A variety of factors can contribute to changes- difficult opponents, easy opponents, injuries, trades, etc. I marked a few of the big occurrences on the graph to make note of those. (Read: I actually did it just to get Donatello’s bald head in this post.) As terrible as the defense has looked recently (relative to other points), look at the encouraging downtrend (again a downtrend “is” an uptrend for defense) recently. Obviously, we’ve played teams like the Clippers and Kings, but we also took on Los Angeles (did a respectable defensive job on them), Utah (hammered them defensively), and Golden State (another terrific job). The moral of the story? We’re in far better position going to the playoffs than you might imagine. 



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