The Blazers brought in Evan Turner for his defense as well as his ball handling skills. I looked into Turner's defensive statistics for last season at 82games.com. For defense, I compared him to All-NBA Defensive Team wing players, as well as recent and incumbent Blazer wings. The bottom line is that he is an excellent wing defender comparing favorably to the league's best, and that he is a better wing defender than Blazer fans have seen in many years.

This list includes the 2016 All-NBA Defensive Team wings. It also includes Batum and Matthews from 2015, their last years as Blazers, since Blazer fans are familiar with them and they are considered good defenders. In addition, it includes the three small forwards from last year's Blazers that played the most minutes. I include Turner's stats both as a SF, the position he will play for Portland, and as a SG. For the other players, I included only the position at which they spent the most minutes.

The data come from "Opponent Counterpart 48 Minute Production." I included the opponent counterpart PER and opponent counterpart effective field goal percent. These can be thought of as defended player PER and defended player eFG%, respectively. I am not quite sure how the PER data is computed, but at least it is done consistently for all players.

Player	PER	eFG%
Turner -€” SF	11.4	.471
Turner -€” SG	13.3	.481
Avery Bradley - SG	13.6	.488
Kawhi Leonard - SF	12.7	.464
Tony Allen - SG	17.9	.523
Jimmy Butler - SG	12.3	.449
Paul George - SF	13.6	.476
Batum 2015 - SF	13.3	.504
Matthews 2015 - SG	13.5	.467
Aminu -€” SF	13.5	.491
Harkless -€” SF	14.2	.501
Crabbe -€” SF	12.2	.485

The results present Turner as a defender on par with the All-NBA Defensive wings. The players he defended as a SF had the lowest PER (11.4) on the list. This defended player PER is lower than Kawhi Leonard, Defensive Player of the Year, and the defended player eFG% is quite close to that of Leonard and George.

In comparison to Blazer wings, as a small forward he is notably better than Batum and three of last year's small forwards (Crabbe is most outstanding among the three, which with his high catch and shoot shooting percentage is probably why we matched him). As a shooting guard, he was on par with 2015 Matthews in terms of defended player PER, but slightly be

The bottom line is that Evan Turner is probably the best wing defender the Blazers have had in recent history, that he will improve the Blazers defense, and that he should be on the watch list for the All-NBA Defensive Team.