Orlando's moves this offseason have been both praised, and highly criticized.  That's what happens when you're active in the offseason after making the NBA finals.  Some will feel your team that made the finals should be brought back the same, and some will feel that you should upgrade, given the fact that you didn't win.

The biggest move of the offseason has so far been trading for Vince Carter.  It's been shown here through numerous posts that Vince is a clear upgrade on offense.  He bests the player he's essentially replacing (Turkoglu) in almost every statistical category.  However, it has also been mentioned that he is not a very good defensive player.  First, let's compare Vince and Hedo in terms of some composite defensive statistics for the 2008-09 campaign:  (All data taken from basketball-reference.com)

As you can see, Hedo clearly played better on defense last year than Vince, as measured by defensive rating, defensive win shares, net defensive plus minus, and opponent PER.  However, Hedo played on an elite defensive team, while Vince played on a young team with plenty of defensive deficiencies.  Many people have made the argument that given the chance to play on an elite defensive team with the reigning DPOY he will improve significantly.

I thought it might be enlightening to look at other players who have been traded in similar circumstances, and how moving from a weak defensive team to an elite defensive team has impacted their own defense.  Note, this is by no means a comprehensive analysis, I am only going to look at how this has impacted a few players to get an idea of what we might expect from Vince next year.

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