re: Solid Take on Pelicans Point Guard Future

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His issue on off-ball D is not coaching. It's a matter of ball-watching and a lack of quickness. On-ball, he uses his length to disrupt ball movement and can defend a lot of shots. Off the ball, he does not pursue his man well at all.

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Just about to say all of this. It is a little bit on the coaching, but it has much more to do with the fact that his best defensive asset (his length) doesn't really help him off ball and fighting through screens.

I usually use the NBA.com live tracking metrics which can be strictly iso.

In strictly iso situations, Evans allows 0.53 PPP and an eFG% of 25, which puts him in the 95th percentile of all players in the NBA in both categories. If you filter out all of the players that played less than 60 games, Evans is 4th in PPP and 6th in eFG% in true iso situations.

This should be taken with a little grain of salt because his frequency percentage and defensive iso opportunities aren't super abundant. Evans only faces a true iso situation on average less than 1 time a game (0.7). For example, draymond green has a slightly worse ppp (0.58) and eFg (26.3) numbers than Evans, but sees true iso situations twice as often (2.1 per game average).

Comparatively, Evans defense outside of iso is poor. When guarding a player coming off screens, Evans is around the league average. When guarding the ball handler in a pick and roll situation, he ranks in the bottom half of the league. When he is guarding the roll man, he is in the bottom 14 percentile, and he is in the bottom 18 percentile when guarding a spot up shot.

Some of this, namely the pick and roll, I think can be attributed to scheme since none of our players guard the roll man very well (one exception being Asik *cough* *cough*) or the ball handler in a pick in roll. But the most of the team does ok against spot up shots, which evans should be effective against given his length. This is probably more due to him loosing his man off ball or missing rotations.