Calling Haliburton our best defender is ... aggressive. He was incredible at guessing and getting in passing lanes creating steals. He wasn't a great, but serviceable on ball defender. Struggled a bit in the pick and roll ( an NBA scout knock on him), and often used his athleticism to bail himself out. I think Jackson may be our best defender next year and hopefully Smith or Conditt are our second best defenders.I feel like the Bart Torvik methodology for project defense is essentially exogenous and does not account for what new players might do on the defensive end of the court and the boards, which is going to affect your net rating and projection, obviously.
If I remember the "documentation" correctly (or really just a blog post), BT projects defense based on a trend analysis of the past few years and makes some adjustments for the physical height of your roster and likely lineups.
So we are doomed to be projected as sucking at defense because... well, our program has sucked at defense for a long time now. So that is a reasonable enough supposition. One of the best models for predicting the weather is just assuming whatever happened yesterday is going to happen again tomorrow.
I wonder how well that projection is going to work on us. The fact we are just bad as a program at defense is a strong argument, but then again, you would hope adding Smith on the boards along with a bunch of rangy wings to guard 3-4-5 and Foster to block shots would help quite a bit on defense. We also lost some comically bad defenders who did play at least rotational minutes for us at times.
Then again, we lost Haliburton -- our best defender -- and have never proven we can be good at defense and rebounding in the past decade, so just assuming it stays that way might be the reasonable thing to do. Either way, it is that end of the floor where we need the most improvements next year.