The Relationship Between Usage and Average Distance to Closest Defender

Oct 29, 2014; Phoenix, AZ, USA; Los Angeles Lakers guard Kobe Bryant (24) against the Phoenix Suns during the home opener at US Airways Center. The Suns defeated the Lakers 119-99. Mandatory Credit: Mark J. Rebilas-USA TODAY Sports

It should be obvious to anyone who watches the NBA that higher usage players draw more attention on offense. One way to look at this would be to look at the average distance to the closest defender for each player and compare that with the Usage rate of the player. Thanks to the new releases from SportVU and scraping abilities of the invaluable Darryl Blackport, we can answer this question:

Here’s the regression (i.e. relationship):

The coefficient isn’t very large (for every 1 foot increase in average distance to the closest defender, usage goes down by 0.89, also note the lower R^2) but what’s more important is the fact that average defender distance is statistically significant. We can interpret the results as: we are 99% sure that the coefficient for average defender distance is negative which means we are 99% sure that as usage goes up, the average distance to the closest defender goes down. This is even more proof that usage is important when debating the usage vs. efficiency curve. We can mathematically see how high usage players attract more defensive attention, which emphasizes the relative value of their efficiency.

An interesting question brought up by one of our writers, Andrew Johnson, was which way the causation runs: Do defenses pay more attention to the higher usage players? Or are lower usage players’ more opportunistic with their shot opportunities? These questions are less black and white and I’ll leave it up to the readers to debate.