Without diving into masses of statistics, the Wizards looked like a better defensive team simply from watching the games and how the team interacted with each other.

Was the improvement significant? I’d hesitate to use that strong of a term….but was the improvement meaningful? I’d say yes.

True that you can’t just look at decreased opponent points per game as a true measure….pace is a good stat to factor in.

I’ll obviously need to analyze more, but it seems like the decreased pace could actually derive from improved defense.

While the defense overall did not improve (adjusted for pace of course), the interior defense must have “improved” as the three point defense got worse. From basketballreference you can see that the stats bear this out: opponent’s overall FGM decreased by 151 while the opponent’s 3PM increased by 85 for a net decrease in opponent 2 Point FGM of 236. The Free Throw Attempts (I use attempts because I’m assuming that our play does not affect the opponent’s FT%) also evidence that opponents were in the lane less – opponents shot 266 less FT in 07-08. Of course, this number may have also been affected by the poor three-point defense as opponents simply launched more 3s, as well as the slower pace (Wiz allowed 22.9 FTA per game this year versus 26.2 last year, but we allowed 24.1 per game if we had played at last years pace).

My takeaway – the numbers back up the intuition. We traded an improvement in interior defense for a dropoff on 3 point defense – the result is absolutely NO improvement from last year . Seriously, is there any way we could have improved our D while giving up the most 3s in NBA history?