Defensive Daily Plus-Minus looks terrible for three Kings (and their future)

It's hard to find a stat where the Sacramento Kings are excelling this season. Some of them are worse than others, such as the D-DPM, which has up to three Kings on the list, depending on when you look. For Dennis Schroder, Zach LaVine, and DeMar DeRozan, it's really not good news.

The Defensive Daily Plus-Minus, also known as the D-DPM, is a predictive stat that comes from the DARKO model. It's used to estimate a player's potential defensive impact per every 100 possessions. Depending on your point of view, it's either advanced mathematics or arcane magic.

D-DPM is a blend of traditional box score stats with advanced plus-minus data. On top of that, it also uses recent performance and career history as a weight. This creates a defensive value that helps forecast a player's future performance, which is used by coaches in their planning.

At the same time, it's not exactly a crystal ball. The math is helpful, but coaches also need to follow their guts and what they're seeing on the court. As such, having it mathematically proven that Zach LaVine is bad at defense is pretty much just confirmation of what everyone has seen for 13 seasons.

D-DPM hangs members of the Kings' roster out to dry

Being that the first D in D-DPM stands for daily, the rankings tend to change rather quickly. As recently as January 3rd, LaVine, Schroder, and DeRozan were all in the bottom ten for the league. Naturally, there have been slight variations since then, but they're all around that benchmark.

It's not a huge surprise that LaVine and DeRozan are at the bottom of the D-DPM rankings. Neither of them is really known as a defender, and they have always been more focused on offense. Still, one would think that a pair of long-term league veterans would have a better defensive outlook than this.

Seeing Schroder's name this far down the D-DPM rankings is a lot more surprising. A big part of his game is his defense, and he's usually been respectably good at it. This stat could be a reflection of the tough season Schroder has been having with the Kings in all aspects of his game.

Being that the current coaching staff is highly focused on defense, D-DPM ratings like these are probably contributing to the Kings' strong desire to trade these three players. Still, D-DPM is not the only way to assess a player's potential defensive impact, and shouldn't be the only metric.