All Hail Rudy Gobert - the Deterrence King
How the Wolves enabled Gobert's deterrence
Playing defense is not an easy task at any basketball level, especially at the NBA level. One player can be a huge difference maker but every player in the lineup must be on the same page with the system they’re playing, the assignment he currently has and ideally shares the same thought with his teammate.
This year’s Timberwolves managed to build that kind of defense, and they didn’t do it in a new or unseen way, they built up a system around Rudy Gobert - one of the best defensive players in the past decade - in a similar way the Jazz did before them. It took them a while to get the machine well-oiled and running smoothly under all conditions, but it’s looking scarily good this season.
Rotations and Switches on a String
The way they managed to achieve that is by having Gobert always defend the player who is in the corner by rotating/switching off the ball very often - thus allowing Rudy to stay in the position where he is the scariest for his opponents.
Rudy has great defensive awareness, he knows where to stand, how to move, and which area to cover to be the most useful defender on the court. His synergy with Mike Conley is very visible, since he was a player he spent the most time on the court when they were both on the successful Jazz team that reached the top of the Western Conference multiple times.
Conley is a great chasing guard, he is very active when going over the screens and always manages to chase the players inside the 3-pt line thus forcing them to either run into Gobert or pull up from mid-range, both of the choices aren’t ideal, and often result in either a possession reset or a low-percentage shot.
When you add McDaniels and Edwards to the mix, who are more-than-willing defenders and have a great defensive motor, along with vastly more committed Towns, you get a defensive lineup worthy of the best in the league title (that they do hold currently). That was something that Gobert never managed to achieve with Jazz.
Here is one segment from their recent game vs the Thunder that caught my attention and depicts some of the points I’ve touched on already. The result of the play is a foul on Shai, but the essence of the video is how in sync everyone is. There is little to no delay when Towns is processing Rudy’s instructions on where to move, and McDaniels builds on that switch along with him by moving closer to Wiggins and putting himself into a more favorable position to dig on Shai’s drive.
Here is another even better example since this one also shows Conley’s in-time rotation, and then crisp switching by KAT-McDaniels finished with a great contest by Gobert.
While it may seem silly that I’m fawning over how in sync the Wolves are on these (and many other) defensive sequences, this kind of general understanding of defensive situations is very often missing in most of the teams, especially those without proper defensive mastermind.
King of Deterrence
So if you combine this system with Gobert’s mind-blowing defensive awareness, scary size, and very good mobility for such a tall player you get constant defensive possessions in which the opponents are scared to challenge him, especially when they aren’t going full steam toward the rim.
Here is one direct example where Gobert forced Banchero to settle for a tough shot outside of the RA on a 1v1 drive. The same deterrence effect can be seen in the video clip from the Rockets’ game where VanVleet kicks out the ball after his drive toward the paint.
The main idea around this whole deterrence thing is that when Gobert is on the court, opponents take shots further away from the rim, and with that, they settle for lower percentage shots (more on that later).
These are the top 17 players in defended shots inside the 6 ft. I stretched it to 17 to get Wembanyama into the mix because his deterrence presence is already very vibrant. It’s scary just how good Wemby is in his rookie season.
Mike Shearer from Basketball Poetry wrote a very in-depth text about Wemby’s defensive season just a couple of days ago so go check it out!
Now back to Rudy. His defensive dominance when he’s on the court is staggering. The opponents’ share of shots inside the restricted area is the lowest among these players when he’s on the court, and they only shoot 60.73% in the RA. But the real impact of both rim-defending and rim-deterring shows in the difference between on-off numbers.
Opponents’ FG% inside the RA increases by a whopping 7.39%, and the share of shots inside the RA increases by 6.90%. And even though Wemby is having a great season, he isn’t even close to what Rudy is doing in the segment of deterrence.
The difference between Rudy and Wemby is the same as it is between Wemby and Porzingis.
Where Are Those Shots Going?
An almost 7% difference in the share of shots for a single zone is a pretty significant number, so let’s take a look at how are they being spread around.
Gobert’s presence drives the opponents away from the hoop and forces them to take lower-percentage shots, with basically all of the Restricted Area shots spilling over to the rest of the paint area and the mid-range zone.
Deterrence Chart
I’ve been playing around with trying to visualize Gobert’s impact on the court, I’m not still sure if I’m pleased with the result, or if I feel like they are 100% accurate representation since this kind of data isn’t visualized that often.
So what I’ve come up with and what I’m satisfied most with is practically a copy of the shot chart (at least the shot chart version that I usually create). The good thing about this sort of chart is that is very verbose and straightforward to interpret. If the square is blue, then the relative share is negative, if it’s red - it’s positive.
However, it’s not that easy to tell if the area is overall negative/positive in terms of changed share of shots. The restricted area is a clear net negative, but the 3-point areas aren’t that clear.
Other big issues are that there are a bunch of empty spots/bins, and a lot of total shots still come at the rim which would make the chart useless if I hadn’t clipped the data because Rudy’s presence reduces the share of shots around the hoop by 2% in a couple of bins, and that is a really big number.
I have also been playing around with some sort of KDE plot that would be a bit more eye-appealing, but maybe a bit more inaccurate or rather distorted data since it creates a density function for every instance of the grid, and our grid would be a bit sparse given the current set up.
Closing Remarks
Overall, I hope I’ve managed to pull out some interesting data that isn’t that mainstream when analyzing defense. I want to end on a note with which I’ve started the post - defense is in the end, all about the team. A small change from D’Angelo Russell to Mike Conley, a substantially more engaged Towns on the defensive side, and overall improved communication between everyone were all important factors in this defensive jump.
The Wolves managed to build a very analytical defense whose heart and soul is Rudy himself, and they are reaping the benefits of the hard work they’ve put in the process to reach this point.