The big buzz is this paper on analytics for defense defense

http://grantland.com/features/department-of-defense/
(written by your boy Kirk)

Here's the actual paper:
On first flythrough I like the direction is going. For all the Offensive analytics out there, there's jack shit for defense which in nature is a lot less quantifable. The cool thing is with tracking data, a whole new data set is available to try to figure if anything useful can be made from it.

http://www.sloansportsconference.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/SSAC15-RP-Finalist-Counterpoints2.pdf

Here is the abstract:
Alexander Franks*, Andrew Miller*, Luke Bornn, and Kirk Goldsberry
Harvard University,
Cambridge, MA, 02138
Email: afranks@fas.harvard.edu, acm@seas.harvard.edu
*These authors contributed equally to this work.
Abstract
Due to the ease of recording points, assists, and related goal-scoring statistics, the vast majority of advanced
basketball metrics developed to date have focused on offensive production. It is straightforward to see who
scored the most points in the 1985/86 season (Alex English, with 2414) or took the most 3-point shots in
1991/92 (Vernon Maxwell, with 473). However, try to look up who had the most points against in
2013/14, or who prevented the most shots from being taken that year, and the history books are,
remarkably, empty. Thus we stand in a muddled state where offensive ability is naturally quantified with
numerous directly-measured numbers, yet we attempt to explain defensive ability through statistics only
loosely related to overall defensive ability, such as blocks and steals. Alternatively, we quote
regression-based metrics such as adjusted plus/minus which give no insight into how or why a player is
effective defensively. This paper bridges this gap, introducing a new suite of defensive metrics that aim to
progress the field of basketball analytics by enriching the measurement of defensive play. Our results
demonstrate that the combination of player tracking, statistical modeling, and visualization enable a far
richer characterization of defense than has previously been possible. Our method, when combined with
more traditional offensive statistics, provides a well-rounded summary of a player’s contribution to the final
outcome of a game.