{"id":838,"date":"2005-02-11T03:14:01","date_gmt":"2005-02-11T09:14:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/67.227.157.91\/~kenpom\/wp_blog\/defensive-assist-percentage\/"},"modified":"2005-02-11T03:14:01","modified_gmt":"2005-02-11T09:14:01","slug":"defensive-assist-percentage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/defensive-assist-percentage\/","title":{"rendered":"Defensive Assist Percentage"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This blog has been one-dimensional this season: it can <a href=\"http:\/\/kenpom.typepad.com\/ha\/2005\/01\/three_point_pro.html\">shoot the three<\/a>, it can <a href=\"http:\/\/kenpom.typepad.com\/ha\/2005\/02\/assist_percenta.html\">dish the rock<\/a>, but it plays no defense. Today, I look at a defensive statistic that gets little press &#8211; the ability to prevent assists. See the <a href=\"http:\/\/kenpom.com\/stats.php\">stats page<\/a> for the defensive assist percentage of all 330 teams.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Defensive assist percentage = assists allowed\/total possessions<\/strong> <\/p>\n<p>On Wednesday, the North Carolina Tar Heels were bottled up for 40 minutes like no other time this ACC season. They didn&#8217;t get many points on the fast break, and they didn&#8217;t get easy points out of the half-court set. UNC, a team that averages two assists on every three field goals made, had only ten assists in 25 made buckets. Shocking.<\/p>\n<p>Or was it? In fact, there must be some skill at preventing fast breaks, preventing the smooth flow of the offense in the half-court, and thus preventing assists. It just so happens that the Duke Blue Devils are the best team in the nation at preventing assists. We can&#8217;t rule out that the Cameron scorer&#8217;s table is unusually stingy in awarding assists, given that Duke&#8217;s own assist total is exceptionally low. But since Duke doesn&#8217;t play all its games at home, the data has to be in the neighborhood of reality.<\/p>\n<p>As a footnote, defensive assist percentage correlates less to an efficient defense than offensive assist percentage does to an efficient offense. You can look for yourself &#8211; while Duke and Kansas have great defenses and prevent assists well, there are some really bad defenses in the top 20 of defensive assist percentage.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This blog has been one-dimensional this season: it can shoot the three, it can dish the rock, but it plays no defense. Today, I look at a defensive statistic that gets little press &#8211; the ability to prevent assists. See the stats page for the defensive assist percentage of all 330 teams. Defensive assist percentage [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/838"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=838"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/838\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=838"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=838"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=838"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}