It's hard to measure a basketball player's individual defense. If Kevon Looney fails to stop Steph Curry's man from scoring after Curry gambles on a steal, who gets the blame? If Klay Thompson nabs a pass after Draymond Green pressures a ball-handler, who gets the credit?
Over at the website FiveThirtyEight, they've developed a new metric to calculate the best defenders in the NBA.
"(The stat) gets at one essential discovery we made in playing around with the opponents' shooting data: the idea of minimizing openness," Nate Silver wrote on FiveThirtyEight. "The main goal of shooting defense, especially in today's spacing-centric, ball-movement-forward offensive era, is really to minimize the chance of an open shot.