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Matthew Yglesias

Matthew Yglesias - Matthew Yglesias is a fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
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Matthew Yglesias is a fellow at the Center for American Progress. His first book, with the working title Heads in the Sand: Iraq and the Strange Death of Liberal Internationalism, scheduled to be published next spring by John Wiley and co., deals with the Democratic Party's struggle to find a post-9/11 foreign policy, focusing primarily on the rise and (hopefully) fall of the liberal hawk movement.

Previously, he was a staff writer at The American Prospect and an Associate Editor at TPM Media, where he contributed to the group blogs Tapped and TPMCafe. His main blog, now at The Atlantic, has existed in various forms since the dark ages of the blogosphere in January 2002.

His writing has appeared in The Guardian, Slate, The New Republic, and The Washington Monthly, and he is a regular on BloggingHeads.tv and makes the occasional radio or television appearance.

Desperately out of touch with the American mainstream, Yglesias was born and raised in Manhattan and studied philosophy at Harvard where he was editor in chief of The Harvard Independent, a campus alternative weekly.

His latest writings can be found on the Matthew Yglesias blog.

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DE-Fense

By Matthew Yglesias

Dec 10 2007, 11:03 AM ET Comment

defense.png

Before the season started, I thought the weakness of the Boston Celtics was going to be defense. Ray Allen seemed like a clear liability, Paul Pierce is unimpressive, and look beyond the "big three" I didn't see much of anything to help out on this end. Kevin Garnett, obviously, is brilliant defensively, but it's a team game. Boy oh boy was I wrong about that. Boston's defense is not only the best in the league, they're by far the best in the league, a fact that may be somewhat obscured by the fact that they play a middling pace whereas San Antonio and Detroit go at a crawl.

The chart plots points allowed per hundred possessions relative to the league median. The very worst teams in the league -- New York and Minnesota -- both allow 5.7 more points per hundred than the median. Boston, by contrast, allows 5.5 fewer points per hundred than does the next best team. In short, not only is Boston the best, but the gap between the best and the second best is enormous. They're leaving everyone else dead in the water.

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