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New advanced NBA stat named after Draymond Green

Kyle Terada-USA TODAY Sports

Draymond Green is one of the best defensive stars in the NBA today. Now, thanks to Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight, there’s a new advanced stat named after him.

Silver, who runs the popular data-driven news and analysis website, unveiled the new rating — DRAYMOND — to honor Draymond Green, “who has long been one of the best players in basketball by opponent shooting” on Tuesday.

It’s an acronym, which breaks down like this:

Defensive

Rating

Accounting for

Yielding

Minimal

Openness by

Nearest

Defender

Silver broke down what they are looking for here with this new metric.

“…what we’re really interested in is how much value a defender provides relative to an open shot. That is to say, we generally don’t want to punish a player for happening to be the nearest defender according to the Second Spectrum data. Some defense is generally better than none; if Player X hadn’t defended the shot, it’s possible that no one else would have.”

He continued to explain how it works.

“Through trial and error, we found that DRAYMOND performs best if you assume that shooting percentages on open shots are about 8 percentage points higher than against average defense. For instance, if a certain type of above-the-break 3-pointer is made 34 percent of the time against average defense, we’d expect it to go in about 42 percent of the time if it was truly open.”

There is a lot more to it, and we highly encourage you to read Silver’s entire article for a greater understanding.

It’s hardly surprising that, after working out all the math and poring over the data, Draymond Green is actually the best defender according to DRAYMOND.

Here’s a look at the top-five defenders during the regular season and playoffs, according to DRAYMOND, for players who have at least 10,000 possessions going back to the 2013-14 season:

  • Draymond Green: +3.16 DRAYMOND Rating
  • Joel Embiid: +2.95 DRAYMOND Rating
  • Kristaps Porzingis: +2.57 DRAYMOND Rating
  • Rudy Gobert: +2.40 DRAYMOND Rating
  • Tim Duncan: +2.20 DRAYMOND Rating

It’s a pretty clear indicator of just how dominant a defender Green has been when it comes to contesting shots.

It’s also quite an incredible accomplishment to be so darn good at something that a company uses your name to come up with a new advanced stat to measure success.

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