The Los Angeles Lakers’ defense is even better than you think
By Jason Reed
The Los Angeles Lakers shockingly had one of the best defenses in the league last season. While true Laker fans knew that the Lakers would be a good defensive team, many were overlooking the Lakers on the defensive side of the basketball.
It was the Lakers’ defense that made the NBA Playoffs such a breeze for Frank Vogel’s team. The Lakers came up against some talented, and red-hot, offensive teams in the Portland Trail Blazers, Houston Rockets, Denver Nuggets and Miami Heat.
The Lakers held each of those teams to score less than they averaged in the regular season. The Lakers are not too shabby offensively, either, but the defense was the biggest reason for the team’s success.
And it somehow got even better this season. Our very own Luca De Angelis broke down why the Lakers are overall better this season than last year and the defense was certainly one of the reasons.
Luca does a great job in breaking down the defensive improvements from last season and what they are succeeding in this season. I wanted to take it one step further, as the advanced numbers tell an incredible story about just how good this Los Angeles Lakers team is defensively.
The Los Angeles Lakers’ fantastic defensive metrics:
Effective field goal percentage (eFG%) is a great tool to measure how well a team is truly shooting the basketball. It essentially takes into account the fact that three-pointers are worth more points than two-pointers which are worth more than one-pointers.
The Lakers’ have allowed the fifth-lowest eFG% this season (.509), so teams are not doing too well in scoring the basketball against the Lakers. LA ranks first in defensive rating (104.5).
The most impressive numbers are on an individual level, though. The worst defensive rating on the team is 110 and belongs to Wesley Matthews. Outside of Matthews, the next-highest defensive rating (for someone who actually has a role in the rotation) is 106. That is fantastic!
Perhaps the most telling sign that the Los Angeles Lakers are elite defensively is how many players they have among the best in the league in terms of Defensive Box Plus-Minus.
DBPM is not a perfect statistic, but it is one that is really good to gauge great defensive players. It is not an accident that the players with the two best DPBMs last season were first and second for Defensive Player of the Year (Giannis Antetokounmpo and Anthony Davis).
At the time of writing this, there are 42 players (with at least 150 minutes played) with a DPBM of 1.0 or better. The Lakers have five players with a DPBM above 1.0, all of which are in the top-40.
Marc Gasol (2.8, ranks 6th), Anthony Davis (2.2, ranks 15th), Alex Caruso (2.1, ranks 18th), Talen Horton-Tucker (1.4, ranks 32nd) and Kentavious Caldwell-Pope (1.1, ranks 39th) are the players that make up the list.
How good is this? No other team in the league has more than three players on this list, and even then, only two teams can say that: the Dallas Mavericks and Memphis Grizzlies.
Yes, it is a small sample size, but all five of those players are well above-average defensively. This is not a case of any of them simply playing one month of good basketball. They are legitimate defensive assets.
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Defense wins championships and there is a good chance that the Los Angeles Lakers win their second in a row.