What's Different?

I mentioned how every player who played for the wolves last year had their drtg decline (improve) from last year to this year. This included players who were traded away like flynn (-5). Even sundiata gaines’ drtg is less this year then last. Every player still in on the teams drtg has declined by 7 pts or more. The universality of this change must be given to the diff in how the 2 coaches handle defense.

The only player who has not seen an improvement is Webster who hasn’t played yet.

logic would suggest a young team with new players (like ours) would improve more than the teams with older players who just showed up out of shape.

The Wolves are playing better than I expected, and I expect them to get better with each passing month.

Yeah, despite the Wolves actually scoring at a less-efficient rate than they did last year, they’ve improved relative to the league because most everyone else has dropped dramatically. They went from being 3 points worse than average last year to being 0.3 points better now. So like you say, relative to the league it’s been a fairly remarkable turnaround.

And their defensive gain has been dramatic enough that they’re still above average despite the stingy scoring thoughout the league. Last year they were 3.9 points worse than average; this year they’re 1.4 points better-than-average in Drtg.

However it’s been accomplished, it’s impressive work by all involved. And outside of maybe Rubio, I’m not sure they’ve got anybody most observers might consider plus man-on-man defenders.

Competence!

It’s not just us, where I think the basic picture is that Adelman has reined things in to try to stanch the defensive bleeding and keep turnovers from going nuts on us. Phoenix is just about in the dead center of the league, these days. Portland’s gone from being the slowest team out there to one of the fastest, which is really interesting.

In general I think the early season’s been affected pretty hard by the lockout, but that still doesn’t explain different teams heading in different directions on that ranked list of team pace.

(As far as not seeing “fast” or “slow” paces lining up with winning or losing so much, sure, teams can win or lose playing lots of different ways. It’s still interesting to see that a given coach approaches his talent in a new way; I think it did matter that Bill Musselman slowed the inaugural Wolves to a crawl to keep games close. The “Pace” number has a lot of indirect stuff causing it, but there still is an overall arc, and it describes something that’s essentially real.)