Nylon Calculus: The worst individual matchups in the NBA

On Jan. 5, the Donovan Mitchell and the Utah Jazz found themselves in Detroit on a back-to-back, looking to build on a 26-point win over the Cavaliers the day before. At that point, the Jazz had gone 4-4 in their last eight games with Mitchell shooting 36.5 percent from the field and 28.6 percent over that span, topping 20 points just twice.

The Jazz have largely lived and died with Mitchell’s offense this season — they’re 19-10 when he scores at least 20 points, 7-9 when he doesn’t. This matchup with the Pistons ended up being an ideal opportunity for Mitchell to get right, with rookie Bruce Brown as his primary defender. Brown was drafted with a decent defensive reputation but was torched by Mitchell.

Mitchell scored 23 points on the 62 possessions where Brown was his primary defender, a rate of 37.1 points per 100 possessions, well above his season-long rate of 32.5.

Since that game, the Jazz have won seven of their last nine, with Mitchell scoring 30.8 points per game and shooting 47.5 percent from the field and 43.1 percent on 3-pointers. Embedded in that stretch was another victory over the Pistons, on Jan. 14, where Mitchell scored 14 points on 23 possessions he was guarded by Brown, a rate of 60.9 points per 100 possessions.

Suffice it to say that Donovan Mitchell has owned that individual matchup with Bruce Brown.

Everyone basketball fan knows this phenomenon — that one matchup that for whatever reason, skill, athleticism, psychology, is just endlessly exploited by one player. Thanks to the NBA’s defensive matchup stats, it’s something we can actually measure as well.

Because most teams only play each other four times at most during a season (and we’re still in the middle of one) the sample sizes here are fairly small. However, I looked at only single-player matchups that had been on the floor for at least 75 possessions this season, roughly 36-minutes worth of a league average 100-possession game. The NBA’s defensive matchup stats aren’t a perfect proxy for defensive assignments — they use player tracking to measure who was the closest defender to each offensive player for the majority of a possession — but they’re close enough for our purposes here. Using a 75-possession cut-off gives us a sample of 564 single-player matchups.

Of that group, the ten most lopsided are below.

There are several fun tidbits in here — Joel Embiid making good on his online trolling of Deandre Ayton, Enes Kanter taking the battle for New York REALLY seriously and some of the league’s best defenders getting shown up. The thing to keep in mind is that the list, top to bottom, is weighted towards good defenders because they’re more likely to be on the floor and more likely to have a consistent defensive matchup, a single offensive player that they stick with across game situations and multiple games.

The other thing to keep in mind is that some of the offensive players we’re looking at already put up absurd point totals. For example, James Harden is the only player to appear twice and appears to completely own two of the better perimeter defenders in the league. However, Harden is averaging a mind-boggling 47.7 points per 100 possessions this season. Caldwell-Pope and Oladipo are actually holding Harden to numbers that are right in line with his season-long numbers.

Thinking about things in this way makes Kanter’s domination of Jarrett Allen even more impressive — the 53.6 points per 100 possessions he’s put up against the Nets center is 27.5 points better than his full-season average. No other matchup in the data set saw an offensive player outperform his full-season scoring average by a wider margin. At the other end of the spectrum, no defender held an offensive player further below his full-season scoring average than Paul George holding DeMar DeRozan to eight points on 92 possessions, an average of 8.2 points per 100, 20.9 points below his full-season mark.

The Tableau below graphs the entire data set — marking each individual matchup by the offensive player, the defender, the number of possessions, the points per 100 possessions of the offensive player and then how that compares to their regular-season average.

One of the interesting things here is how many of the matchups involve the offensive player scoring below their regular-season average. This related to the idea of the best defenders being displayed here, being given consistent defensive assignments. Most scorers do more damage against switches, mismatches and by exploiting the players who don’t defend normally them often. For example, Donovan Mitchell has scored about 31.3 points per 100 possessions against defenders who have been on him for at least 40 possessions this season. Against all other defenders, he’s scoring 32.7.

So, to the question of the most lopsided matchup in the league, the scorer who most thoroughly owns a specific defender this season, I’m partial to Paul George on Tim Hardaway Jr. His per-100 scoring average is slightly less than Kanter’s on Allen, and it’s a smaller, albeit still impressive, 17.6 points per 100 possession improvement on his full-season scoring average. But it also comes with five assists and zero turnovers and, collectively, the Thunder have scored at a rate of 142.9 points per 100 possessions when Hardaway Jr. is guarding Paul George.

And as to Donovan Mitchell, he’s probably emailing the league office to advocate for abolishing conference so he can play the Pistons and Bruce Brown a few more times next season.