Season-Long Theme: Backcourt Defense

This may or may not be a regular* feature, but with little news prior to tonight's game I thought I'd take a moment and look at one game's worth of evidence regarding one of my areas of concern: backcourt defense.

Pacers @ Hawks, 10.28.09

First, the two-man backcourts...

Backcourt	Def Poss	Opp Pts	Def Eff
Bibby/Johnson	63	57	0.905
TEAM	101	109	1.079
Teague/Crawford	19	22	1.158
Crawford/Johnson	8	11	1.375
Teague/Johnson	8	16	2.000

As for three-man backcourts, the Hawks played Joe Johnson at small forward for just three defensive possessions. Atlanta allowed 3 points on 2 possessions with the Teague/Crawford/Johnson backcourt on the floor and 0 points on 1 possession with the Bibby/Crawford/Johnson backcourt on the floor.

There aren't, of course, many definitive conclusions to draw from such a small sample size. The Bibby/Johnson backcourt allowed the fewest points but also got to play the most against Indiana's TJ Ford/Brandon Rush backcourt. How much credit for Indiana's starting backcourt's offensive struggles should go to Bibby and Johnson and how much blame should be assigned to the Pacers is, as far as I'm concerned, an open question but at least now we know what happened.

Here's a table of the on-court defensive efficiencies for each player mentioned in this post:

Player	Def Poss	Opp Pts	Def Eff
Bibby	64	57	0.891
Johnson	82	87	1.061
TEAM	101	109	1.079
Crawford	30	36	1.200
Teague	29	41	1.414

Lest anyone get too concerned about Jeff Teague's defense, the Hawks scored 33 points during the 27 offensive possessions (Off Eff: 1.222) for which he was on the floor. For the game, the Hawks scored 1.188 points per possession.

*Regular in the sense of bi-weekly, monthly, etc. It will almost certainly not be a regular feature after each game.