Welcome to Money B-ball! I will be using data on NBA player statistics to model player performance. For the first post of this blog, I used data from the 2014-2015 NBA season to evaluate the effectiveness of NBA players in defending shooters by looking at how much they reduced the normal shooting averages of NBA shooters. In this analysis, I found that the top 10 defenders in reducing total shooting averages are: 1) Andrew Bogut (-9%) 2) Rudy Gobert (-8%) 3) Tony Allen (-8%) 4) Andre Roberson (-7%) 5) Roy Hibbert (-7%) 6) Draymond Green (-6%) 7) Serge Ibaka (-6%) 8) Anthony Davis (-5%) 9) Joakim Noah (-5%) 10) Trevor Booker (-5%) There's a lot of familiar names on this list - notable shot blockers like Rudy Gobert and Serge Ibaka. Most of these players are power forwards and centers, with the exception of Tony Allen and Andre Roberson, who are both defensive specialists. Andrew Bogut reduced the shooting averages of players he faced by more than 9%! Here are the b