BRUNSON BURNER: to NYK for 4yrs/$104M (no SnT) | NYK docked 2025 2nd for tampering

[mvossman]

You're probably right but the numbers actually say that Brunson is pretty good defensively. Maybe it's just that we watch him every night and tend to point out the missed plays or the times he unperformed due to being a human and not a robot?

Looking at NBA.com the NBA average DRTG is 110.6


Lowry career 105.4 DefRtg
Lowry first 4 years: 105 DefRtg

Brunson career 108.2 DefRtg


Lowry Defensive Win Shares first 4 years:     1.3 / 1.8 / 1.4 / 1.8
Brunson Defensive Win Shares first 4 years: 1.0 / 0.6 / 1.1 / 2.2

Those are boxscore stats which generally do a poor job assessing defensive value.  The best on/off advanced stats (EPM/Lebron/Darko) all have Brunson defense roughly -.5 to -1 and Lowry roughly .5 to 1.  Those stats are not perfect either, but they do ok over a big enough sample size (in this case several years), and they show a significant difference between the two players.