A week ago on his weekly radio show, Shaka Smart put into words what has been rumbling on Twitter for a while. Stevie Mitchell’s case for defensive player of the year needed a little boost of momentum in the public sphere.
It’s not that the world didn’t’ know Stevie was a great defender, but there simply wasn’t a narrative around his impact, particularly the things that go beyond the box score.
Since that show, Marquette added two dominant home victories over mid-tier Big East teams, with Mitchell helping to shut down two of the conference’s most dominant scorers in Quincy Olivari and Devin Carter.
The Journal-Sentinel’s terrific MU beat reporter Ben Steele weighed in with a great article, including quotes from Shaka and others.
Heck, even FS1 play-by-play Jason Benetti mentioned Stevie being in the hunt for D-BEPOY on the telecast right as he forced Carter into a tough contested runner that didn’t hit iron.
My Two Cents
And believe it or not, I wasn’t going to join the chorus. I love Stevie as a player and a human, the ultimate representative of what makes Marquette special beyond the floor, I just didn’t personally believe he was the best defender in the league.
I’m a homer, undoubtedly, but tend to hone in my natural fan tendencies with hard data as best I can. And usually, that means being clever enough to highlight the stats that best make whatever homerish case I’m trying to make. And though I tried, I couldn’t make the jump to get Stevie that hardware.
I mention all this because I do think it’s important to note that I could write a case for Ryan Kalkbrenner, or Donovan Clingan or Devin Carter and find plenty of data to supplement those assertions. It’s by no means a slam dunk. But after digging through more video and seeing Marquette’s defense continue to surge, I’d like to hop aboard the Stevie Mitchell for BE DPOY train.
Thievie Mitchell
I’m going to say this right off the top. Steals and steal rate are not a good indicator of defensive skill. That is not a novel concept or something I personally made up, it is what coaches like Nevada Smith have been preaching for years.
The issue isn’t that steals aren’t good, they are one of the highest value actions in the game, as efficiency for most offenses skyrockets after a live ball turnover. Rather, simply perusing the steals column in the box score gives you a very incomplete narrative.
For instance, if you jump a passing lane trying for steals 4 times in a game and it results in 1 steal for your team but also two uncontested layups for your opponent because it got you out of position, that aggressiveness actually cost your team points, but it won’t mention that in any box score or even in KenPom. So simple steal rates (how many possessions end in a steal when you are on the floor) in isolation aren’t great measures of defensive prowess. The same goes for block rate.
OMax Prosper was easily Marquette’s best defender and a 1st round draft pick last season primarily based off his defensive skills. He had atrocious counting stats for steals and blocks, not because he was a bad defender, but because his impact was not simple to measure on paper. If you watched how he was able to switch all 5 positions, had the speed and length to play an aggressive press, and could contest shots at any distance without fouling, there would be no question about his defensive level.
And yet, although we don’t yet have a perfect all-in-one metric for defensive impact, we can piece together multiple types of stats to add to that context. Take the chart below for example.
This chart plot Stevie’s otherworldy, league-leading 4.6% steal rate with a more robust metric called Defensive Box Plus Minus. DBPM takes the box score stats and attempts to quantify them within the contribution to the overall team defense. Here’s a full breakdown if you want more info. https://www.basketball-reference.com/about/bpm2.html
But needless to say, looking at the distribution above, individuals on good defensive teams fare better than those on poor ones. So while there is a bit of double counting the importance of the steal here, it also is balanced out by Stevie’s low block and rebound rate.
Which is a big pet peeve. Grabbing a lot of boards is primarily conditioned on your positioning on the floor. Big men tend to be near the rim, where a majority of missed shots land. So while there is plenty of skill involved, simple floor positioning of guards like Stevie will put them at a disadvantage for other commonly cited defensive stats (again, blocks).
And going back to steals, Stevie’s thefts have had game-altering impacts this season. They have been incredibly valuable to the team success.
Super advanced stats
Luckily, we don’t have to simply rely on rudimentary stats like steals and DBPM. There are sophisticated models now that weigh everything from box score, to plus minus, to teammates to opponent quality and run it through fancy regressions in order to give us a better understanding of what kind of impact a player has on the floor.
In Evan Miya’s Defensive Bayesian Performance rating, Mitchell ranks 4th in the conference, at 2.92.
In Hoop-Explorer’s D-RAPM, Mitchell ranks 4th of active players, at -3.4.
While he doesn’t lead in either, he’s in that elite group of two very different models attempting to do the same thing. Which tells us that no matter how fancy you want to slice it, Mitchell belongs in the conversation for best defenders.
Off Night
And this is where Shaka’s words at the top make their mark. It’s great to see stats back up what the eye is telling us. Watch any Marquette game and Stevie is like a gnat buzzing around that team’s best perimeter player.
Here are the top 4 scorers in the Big East in terms of points per game, as of 3/1.
Against Marquette, Quincy Olivari had his 2nd worst offensive game of the Big East season, with an ORtg of 82.
Against Marquette, Devin Carter had 5 points and 5 turnovers in the first half, before a flurry of garbage time 3s adjusted the final box. And still finished well below his season average for ORtg.
Against Marquette, Jayden Epps had his 2nd worst game of the season, with an ORtg of 58.4
This isn’t to say the off games are exclusively Stevie’s doing, but as a primary recipient of the toughest assignments, I do think it’s more than just a coincidence.
Team Success
Ultimately, what ends up mattering for these kinds of awards isn’t simply that a player is the best, but that they play at an elite level and have a major contribution to the team’s ultimate success. And because defense is such a team endeavor, team success should matter greatly here.
So let’s point out that despite losing an elite, NBA-level wing, Marquette’s defense hasn’t just improved from last season, it took a fairly significant leap forward. MU’s AdjD rating on KenPom is 4.1 points better than last season at this point in the year, correlating with a 30 spot jump in the national rankings. It currently has the highest ranked defense in the Big East (14th). That was unfathomable in the preseason. Currently Marquette’s defensive ranking on KenPom is tied with 2012 for best in the last 20 years.
No, Stevie isn’t the sole person responsible, but for a team so predicated on creating turnovers, the main wreaker of that havoc deserves a special callout. Outside of simple turnovers, he also gets his hands on more balls than any Marquette player. He averages a team-leading 6.0 deflections a game, per Marquette’s game notes, with Oso Ighodaro being the only other player over 5 a game.
When you add in the minutes played to that deflection count, Mitchell is getting a hand on the ball every 4 minutes of games time, compared to Oso’s 5.9 minute rate. This isn’t to knock Oso, who does have an unbelievable defensive case himself, simply to highlight that Stevie’s activity translates to direct impact in the primary way Shaka likes to measure it.
At the end of the day, Stevie’s energy and aggressiveness are at the vanguard of a team with legitimate national title aspirations. He may not end up getting the nod from the league, but there’s no denying he helps makes Marquette special on the defensive side of the court.
With a strong finish these next 3 games, he deserves to have his name written in the Big East record books.
Paint Touches 
Rooting hard for Stevie since he comes from our hometown high school…….go former Wilson Bulldog!!!