Taking away easy looks from your opponents is often just as important to success as making your own shots.
Stats review: Defensive impact
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With six rounds remaining in the Turkish Airlines EuroLeague Regular Season, there's still a lot to be settled as half a dozen teams currently outside of the Play-In Showdown window are still within striking distance of three of the four teams currently holding those spots. The lone team out of reach for that group is just two victories away from second place, as the pressure is building on both cut-lines of the EuroLeague's new postseason concept.
There are a lot of different ways for teams to win games down the stretch. Whether it's a hot shooting game from the field, a few extra rebounds to tip the scales on the basis of volume, or a few defensive stops, the parity in the EuroLeague gives teams endless routes to victory on a given night. Several teams this season have done their work on a wider scale, consistently taking away high-percentage shots from opponents with solid execution on defense.
When listening to coaches or analysts talk about defensive strategy, one subject that often comes up is what a team is able to take away from an opposing offense. At the professional level, it is very difficult to dictate the action consistently from the defensive end, but several teams have managed to do just that for stretches this season.
The graphic above ranks the top nine teams in half-court defensive Synergy Shot Quality. SSQ is a metric that calculates the expected value of any given shot based on a data-driven model that considers all the advanced tracking data Synergy Sports has collected on every field goal attempted in EuroLeague games over the last decade. It also includes the percentage of shots these teams have faced in the two spots where teams are most frequently able to move the needle: attempts at the rim and in catch-and-shoot situations on the perimeter with half-court situations. The latter qualifier there is important. Because defenses often have much less control over the shots they face in transition, the calculations in the table look only at situations where these teams were able to set their defenses.
A lot of the finer details of a team's game plan tend to manifest in the numbers above. Little things like how well a team denies interior passes, tags rollers, prevents putbacks, avoids over-helping, and communicates switches all factor into just how much a team can alter their opponents' shot selection.
FC Bayern Munich is this season's best example of a team that limits quality shots to its opponents. While they do not rank as prominently forcing turnovers or avoiding fouls, Bayern's defenders are consistently in the right places off the ball, which allows them to chase shooters off the three-point line, and they limit both cut and put-back opportunities with their efforts inside.
Fenerbahce Beko Istanbul is the team that provides the sharpest contrast to Bayern as they have done a phenomenal job taking away spot-up jumpers but face more shots at the rim than any team on this list as a result.
As the adage goes, defenses cannot take everything away, and at this level, there is also very much a give and take that teams consider when building a defensive game plan. Taking one thing away often presents new challenges in other areas or shines a light on weaker personnel. On a possession-by-possession basis, the subtle adjustments offenses can utilize only make it more difficult for defenses to control the action and manage that give and take.
That's what makes the defensive accomplishments of the teams listed above so impressive. It takes a huge effort to shift shot quality in the EuroLeague from a defensive perspective – and sometimes not even that is enough to come away with wins.