Defensive z-scores are a way of measuring a player’s defensive impact relative to his era and competition – that is, relative to the context in which he played. The table below uses a heatmap to show the differences between players in each column.
The columns toward the left (in red), are scores where a negative value is better than a positive value. The best players are those with lightly-colored red cells in those columns. The columns on the right side of the table (in green) represent cases where a positive score is better than a negative score. The best defenders have dark green cells in these columns. For more explanation on the diffference btween these two groups of scores, read here (or click the blue button below which says “DEFENSIVE Z-SCORES”).
For more information on what a z-score is, and how they are calculated, click the blue button below. To see the same information in bar chart format with color-mapping, visit the Season Dashboard.