Detroit Pistons: Christian Wood vs Thon Maker explained

Over/Under-Reacting

Effort doesn’t always lead to results and that’s evident in Maker’s tape. I’m sure there’s plenty of you reading this right now that would give more effort than Wood on defense. That doesn’t mean you’d be better defenders.

Let’s look at some numbers. Contesting 2 pointers is a pretty good indicator of defense. Wood contested 71 shots last year, letting opponents score 2.4% better than their average percentage.  Maker contested 342 shots, making opponents shoot 2.1% worse than their average. Looking further back to get a bigger sample size doesn’t make Wood look better either.

Here’s a classic Wood contest. Not fouling is the first priority and grabbing the rebound is more important than blocking the shot.

Here’s a classic Maker contest. Blocking the shot is the main goal and staying in bounds is not always doable against contact.

Maker is the better rim protector even though he has a 9-foot-2.5 standing reach compared to Wood’s 9-foot-3.5. That’s almost as long as Myles Turner (9-foot-4) who’s one of the best shot blockers in the game. However, Wood only recorded 1.8 blocks per 100 possessions last year. Maker blocked 2.5 shots and his shot-contesting numbers near the rim are better.

Wood is the significantly better defensive rebounder with a career defensive rebounding percentage of 21.9 compared to Maker’s 15.5. Wood is just longer, probably stronger and has bigger hands. Maker fares better in the advanced defensive metrics.

Perimeter defense is harder to evaluate. Maker is significantly quicker laterally and more active which doesn’t always help him on closeouts. He often jumps further than he should, making it easy for even significantly slower players to get by him.

Wood is much more moderate which doesn’t fare well against good shooters. Ideally, you want to hide him on lesser shooters. His first priority is to stay in front of people.

He gets himself into a nice defensive stance and he can move his feet but the extra effort to stop his man from scoring is not there.

Maker just jumps at people no matter their shooting ability. Not making calculations like that significantly affects Maker’s defensive ceiling but that’s a topic for another time. It just goes to the point I made earlier about Casey.

If Maker is getting playing time because he supposedly has defensive potential that he actually doesn’t possess, that’s a problem. Having the ability to recover from behind is great but not that great when you’re the whole reason a recovery has to be made.

This is what a good closeout against a big man not named Kristaps Porzingis or Lauri Markkanen looks like. The outside foot is planted above the attacker, forcing him to go baseline.

Closing out on Myles turner like he’s Kyle Korver is not acceptable nor sensible. Making the extra effort to block him from behind can get you extra points with the coach but doesn’t help the team that much. Maker creates a blocking opportunity that wouldn’t exist in the first place if he wasn’t so frantic.