His hands are always up, his feet don't stop moving, and he doesn't bite on pump fakes. Brunson is still the sort of star level scorer that should destroy him with his speed, but Hauser is as disciplined a defender as there is, and it absolutely shows.
Doogie does defense, the Sam Hauser thread
- Thread starter chilidawg
- Start date
Yeah Brunson definitely made plays last night, especially in transition where he and Hart are a lethal combo. But in terms of "Sam controlling what Sam can control", he got an A+ last night. Not biting on upfakes is like 60% of defending Brunson, who is giving up 3+ inches to just about anyone who defends him.
Derrick White bit on a Luka upfake under the rim in one of the Finals games - I'm sure lovegtm can cite game and timestamp - got the and-1 drawn on him, and immediately hung his head in shame. He was angry with himself, knew exactly what he shouldn't have done. For Sam to have discipline that sometimes even Derrick "always doing the right thing" White lacks, is truly special levels of mental focus.
Derrick White bit on a Luka upfake under the rim in one of the Finals games - I'm sure lovegtm can cite game and timestamp - got the and-1 drawn on him, and immediately hung his head in shame. He was angry with himself, knew exactly what he shouldn't have done. For Sam to have discipline that sometimes even Derrick "always doing the right thing" White lacks, is truly special levels of mental focus.
Ha, while I don't remember the exact game, I had the same thought watching last night:
"Oh, this team just finished locking in for 5 games of Luka pump fakes. Brunson thinks that weak shit is going to work on them, from a guy who's 7 inches shorter?"
It's one thing to endlessly pumpfake when you're 6-7 and can barely get the fadeway off over Hauser. It's another altogether to try it when you're 6-0.
Good to see it's not a lingering thing:
View: https://twitter.com/ByJayKing/status/1851737581790097430
View: https://twitter.com/ByJayKing/status/1851737581790097430
Back injuries tend to be come and go, it's not great regardless, but better to be available than not.
I’m not sure but his floater game when he races in from the three point line has really emerged as well. It helped him get his three-pointer going tonight.
Fundamentally sound defender. Great at moving the offensive player with his chest while showing his hands.
Usually, gives up a challenged mid-ranger or steers his man into help.
People are going to kill me for this, but he's a better regular season defender than Jrue or Tatum right now imo.
I don't know if I'd go this far (even in the regular season, ceiling is so much more important than floor), but among the regulars I think only Horford is more consistently disciplined on defense than Hauser. He moves his feet, keeps his hands up, doesn't gamble, and always knows where his help is. Cade looked unstoppable at times tonight, but Hauser just buried him. Teams seem to have caught onto the fact that he's one of the most dangerous offensive players in the league when he's hot, but haven't yet realized that only the quickest or biggest of bench players are going to be able to get good shots off against him. Hopefully they never figure it out.
He picked a great time to have his best game of the year, else this could've gotten really hairy. Just his 2nd game of the season with 4+ 3s, after having 19 such games in the regular season last year (and 3 more in the playoffs).
I have a hard time separating how much is him being good and how much is guys try to do things they’re not good at against him because nobody respects him. I feel like his impact numbers would look worse if teams weren’t just giving away possessions trying to iso him so much.
That's an old narrative imo. He just plays straight-up good defense now.
Yeah, I figured that would be the case. It's pretty early in the season, so any defensive stats will be really noisy. This is me trying to front-run the future a bit, since I think his eye test has been really good lately.
I don’t disagree that he’s good. But he still gets a boost from being targeted. It’s less than it used to be but I still see it happen all the time.
Hauser is an interesting wing.
He has great anticipation and positioning along with decent length. Overall, he is very good at staying in front of his man on D. At the same time, on offense he really can't get by anyone off the dribble (he only gets free off pump fakes when people play him for the 3). You'd think there would be some quickness correlation between the 2, but not for Hauser.
Jaylen on the other hand can get by his man at will, but gets blown by far more often than Sam.
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The last part is what really stands out for me about Hauser: he almost never gets blown by, but he also seems to be there to contest/bother shots, which is the usual thing you lose when you never get blown by.
He does seem to have very good positioning from which to contest sorta, but also leave himself enough gap space that he can recover on a drive. I was noticing that positioning a lot tonight, for several different players. Watch Tillman on his (few) minutes - he's often like 3 steps dropped behind his guy. Some of that, I'm sure, is a lack of respect for someone's 3 shot - but some of it is basically a confession that he knows his footspeed won't get him to stay in front of someone without that sort of cushion. White is right up in his guy's business, because he has utter confidence in his reaction time and footspeed. Hauser is like one step away - close enough to contest, with his height, but far enough away to still contain.
I wonder how much that's coaching, vs randomness, vs reflecting players' own habits or self-assessment of a matchup.
He went coast to coast and finished with a nice layup yesterday, which I hadn't seen before. Normally I don't want to see him taking more than 2 dribbles.
Please don't make us watch Tillman on D
He's out of shape & gets beat repeatedly. He needs to take 2 months off & work the excess weight off (X is like watching GRANT Season2 all over again)OTOH White is so good at trailing/blocking/contesting shots from behind that it lets him overplay passing lanes or provide help while still getting back to his man.
Hauser is fundamentally sound on D; he's been like that from Day 1 with the C's (& Virginia).
Sam rarely gets targeted anymore, but when he does, it usually turns into a contested mid-range jumper.
He also has sneaky girth/size, guys can't just bully him by going through his chest.
His steals/blocks #s will never be outstanding since he never gambles, so he'll probably stay the Celtic's secretly good defender.
He has a good defensive mind and good discipline. Somewhere along the line he had a very good coach who helped build those practices. It's part of what made Marcus and Grant good on defense, educated guesses of where the guy is going to go next, anticipating those moves and getting a small advantage before it happens, all while maintaining your line and avoiding selling out and giving a path to the basket. He has solid off ball awareness as well, part of that ability to read and anticipate. He won't ever be in the DPOY conversation with mediocre length and average athleticism, but he is our secret squirrel defender. He's a guy who can eat minutes and be productive even on nights where his shot isn't falling, since his defense is solid and his offensive spacing is a persistent threat. That has real value.
There's no good short answer, but the best I can muster is that it's based on play-by-play performance and stats, such that a good defensive rating emerges when, if someone is on the floor, the opponents tend to do a little less well than they do otherwise. There are a lot of adjustments for the specific players they're opposing, the teammates who are on the floor, the game context, and the extent to which stats reflect value-added on the floor. But the important thing to say is that it is NOT just box-score-based, i.e. overvaluing steals and blocks and defensive rebounds as all that "defense" consists of. It's play-by-play based, so it's teasing out the signal from that in similar ways to how +/- type metrics do, and is relying on box-score stats as a crutch, but one among several.
@bowiac (who seems to have gone dark around here) has extensive methodology pages if you want more detail, and offers statistical evidence that his system predicts future fantasy-relevant stat accumulation better than other all-in-one metric systems. So for example some of the optimizations it does, make its predictions stabilize against small sample sizes faster than other metrics like EPM or PIPM. Very useful attributes and a lot of thought and research are built in. But it's not a holy grail of defensive value - indeed, I'd say defense is the area that our best stats are weakest in. For one thing, the eye test and DARKO consistently disagree very strongly on Jaylen Brown's defense - and he's got many thousands of possessions of data, so it's not a matter of sample size. Instead it's a limitation of what we're able to capture. A categorical improvement over today's state of the art would probably require taking the motion-tracking data that has been available since ~2013, and use it to assess how closely people can stay to their guy, how good they are at switching, how rarely they lose somebody, and for 1v1 situations, how well they hold up - does their opponent shoot above or below expectation for each shot they take against you. Things like that. Shit, we only started getting stats on ball deflections (only some of which become steals) in the last few years. And let me assure you as someone who's played with similar data in soccer, working with motion-tracking data is EXCEPTIONALLY hard data engineering work. But for what was publicly available 5-6 years ago when he built DARKO, and is of reasonable data size and complexity, this was as good as anyone could really do, so we all tend to go to it first when we want a check on our hot takes.
Tons of value. Doing the basic things right, consistently, is a bar that a surprisingly low fraction of NBA players clear.
I was mostly objecting to the positive comparisons to Jrue Holiday, who has a career's worth of doing not just the basic things right, but also having an ability to "make a play" (as Andrew Nembhard will tell you), and being able to add value in lots of diverse situations, from "switched onto a center" to "reading a transition situation and making the right move". When he's on, basically everything an opponent tries to do becomes like 10% harder, and the only person who has seemed unaffected was Steph Curry (who can get his screen-curl C&S 3 off without even noticing defenders, against all but the very fastest guys in the league). Everyone else generally pays the Holiday Tax. So I'm a little hesitant to overreact to Sam's development up to "60th percentile defensive skill" according to DARKO, be a prisoner of the moment, and proclaim him better than a guy who is deservedly legendary in that department.
I'm mostly agreeing. The whole "who can we live without if tax penalties become a problem" conversation is a separate one. Sam becoming a credible swiss army knife who can shoot is a great development regardless of what PBS does to the roster, same as PP developing.
On the shooting side, some 3P numbers:
- Preseason plus opening night: 19/43 .442
- Then he missed 3 games due to injury. Over the next 7 games, he went: 17/49 .347
- Since then, he's 35/70 .500
I have a mildly stressful life, with a range of responsibilities, and there are many things in the world about which I worry each day, and monitor closely.
Sam Hauser's shooting is not one of those things.
Agreed. I noted this morning that his 3PT% now sits at .364 for the season, which is well below his norms. So I looked at the game logs and saw that he had that 7 game stretch after his injury where he was really off (for him) and that since mid-November, he has been lighting it up.
My guess (and it seems like you would agree!) is that by the end of the season, his 3PT% will be back into the .420 range once again.
Good thing Hauser doesn’t get paid based on the amount of time he has the ball in his hands.
Him adding his quick release, both in spot up and on the move, while shooting the same high percentage, has been most impressive.
The next way he can elevate his game a bit is by being more consistent in affecting a game. He has hit double figures in only 7 of 18 games this season, all in the low teens until his 20 points on 12 shots in the win against the Pistons when he started with Tatum out.
SSS, but Boston is 6-1 when Sam hits double figures, and 8-3 when he doesn’t
Him adding his quick release, both in spot up and on the move, while shooting the same high percentage, has been most impressive.
The next way he can elevate his game a bit is by being more consistent in affecting a game. He has hit double figures in only 7 of 18 games this season, all in the low teens until his 20 points on 12 shots in the win against the Pistons when he started with Tatum out.
SSS, but Boston is 6-1 when Sam hits double figures, and 8-3 when he doesn’t