Archive for the 'Statgeekery' Category

In Part II of this series, I developed a method of estimating a team's probability of winning the NBA Championship based on the allocation of their possessions among their top 5 players. The idea is that, assuming 2 teams are championship-caliber, the one who follows the time-tested pattern of Star 1a + Star 1b + 3 role players will be more likely to win a championship. Today, I'm going to apply this to all regular-season teams in NBA history, and see which teams were theoretically built for postseason success, then look at what actually happened to them.

First, we need to define what it means to be a "championship-caliber team". Historically, the average regular-season SRS of all NBA champions is 6.07, and the median SRS is 6.059. Obviously, teams have won with SRS scores of under 6 (the 2006 Heat were the last team to do so), but as a general rule, if you post an SRS of 6 or greater during the regular-season, you have established yourself as either the odds-on favorite or at least one of the leading candidates to win the NBA title, which is what we're going for here.

Read the rest of this entry »

After yesterday's post about optimal championship usage patterns, I got a lot of good feedback about possible alternative versions of the same study that would better capture the effect I was going for. When setting up for the initial study, I struggled between sorting by minutes played and by raw modified shot attempts (MSA), each of which had unique advantages. But a nice compromise (suggested by reader Brian) would be to isolate the top 5 players on each team by minutes -- thereby approximating their most frequent 5-man unit -- and then sort by MSA%, the percentage of team MSA that each player took while on the floor:

Read the rest of this entry »

In basketball perhaps more than any other sport, the concept of team-building -- creating a cohesive group that fits together and may be greater than the sum of its parts -- is phenomenally important. In baseball, a sport dominated by one-on-one matchups, not a whole lot of consideration has to be made for how teammates work together; to make a great team, you basically grab the 25 best players you can, throw them together, and watch them produce. But in basketball, teammates have to work together while simultaneously "competing" for touches & shots. Throw together a baseball lineup of 9 guys who each create 100 runs, you'll probably score 900 runs; throw together a basketball lineup of 5 20 PPG scorers, you probably won't score 100 PPG. There's no upper limit on the number of runs the baseball lineup can produce, but there is an upper limit to the points the basketball lineup scores, because teams are limited by a finite number of minutes in a game, and as a result, lineups are limited by a finite number of touches & shots to be allocated to the individual players.

That's why a stat like Possession% (the % of team possessions a player uses while on the floor) is important in looking at how the pieces of a team fit together. A lineup of All-Stars would be interesting, but perhaps a less-talented lineup with one 26% usage guy, two 20% guys, an 18% guy, and a 16% guy would be even better if the All-Stars are not happy with the way they fit together or are unable to operate at peak efficiency in lesser roles, while the less talented lineup features players who are all at their optimal usage levels. The whole of the latter would be greater than the sum of the former's parts.

Read the rest of this entry »

On the subject of "Least Likely NBA Championships," there are a lot of different ways to frame the discussion. You could look at the teams with the toughest paths (i.e. strength of schedule) en route to the title; you could look at the teams whose regular-season record would have predicted them to win the least often; you could even look at the teams with the closest margins of victory in the playoffs. I've actually done a few of those studies, but today I want to look at the group of players with the least collective talent to win a championship -- or at least the smallest amount of collective accomplishments heading into the title season -- which is another way to look at the "most surprising champs" question.

Read the rest of this entry »

Here at Basketball-Reference, we recently gathered a new database of player positions that goes further than merely listing guards, forwards, and centers. It isn't live on the player pages yet (that's coming soon), but I've worked with it in several posts over the past few weeks, and today I'm going to use it to see which position has traditionally been the strongest for teams that are successful in the postseason.

Read the rest of this entry »

When the Orlando Magic put the finishing touches on their 4-game demolition of the Atlanta Hawks last night, it marked the 110th time in NBA history that one team swept another in a series of 3 games or longer. Several hours later, the Lakers added #111 to that list, ending Utah's season with an 0-4 series defeat. Both performances were impressive, so today I wanted to look at where they ranked in the pantheon of all 111 sweeps, and which series were truly the most lopsided of the lopsided.

Read the rest of this entry »

With a 2-0 lead in their conference semifinal series, this year's Suns team is currently looking like a good bet to defeat their hated archrivals, the San Antonio Spurs, and make the Western Conference Finals. The Suns have never advanced past the Conference Finals in the Nash era, and this year's likely WCF opponents have been a tough nut for Phoenix to crack, but it looks like the 2010 season is shaping up to be as good an opportunity as any in recent memory for Phoenix to make the Finals.

If you had told me a few years ago that we'd be saying this in May of 2010, after Mike D'Antoni departed and Steve Kerr shifted the franchise's direction with the acquisition of Shaquille O'Neal for Shawn Marion, I would have said you were crazy. Even now, this Suns team doesn't "feel" as great as the team that went deep in the 2005/06/07 playoffs, but here they are, with a chance to do something that the earlier incarnations of the Nash Suns never did. So how do these Suns stack up to Phoenix's past playoff teams?

Read the rest of this entry »

Watching Boston destroy Cleveland in the second half of last night's game, on Cleveland's home court, made me think about surprising playoff outcomes. Going into a game between Boston and Cleveland at Quicken Loans Arena, you would expect the Cavs to win by at least ~3.3 points even if you knew nothing about the two teams, since that's the average margin by which the home team wins any given game. And if you did know about the relative quality of the two teams -- Boston won 61% of its regular-season games, Cleveland won 74% -- you would expect Cleveland to win by even more. An example: using SRS, you might expect the Cavs to win by roughly 6 points (6.2 - 3.4 + 3.3 = 6.1). And, not coincidentally, the betting line on last night's game was Cleveland -6. But instead, Boston won by 18, a difference of 24 vs. what we would have expected going into the game.

Read the rest of this entry »

After I posted a list of the Top 100 elimination-game performances by Win Shares since 1991 on Monday, several readers mentioned that they wanted to see the flip side of that, the biggest "chokes" in elimination games by Win Shares since '91. Well, here you go: the list of the 100 worst elimination-game performances by WS in the era for which we have box scores...

Read the rest of this entry »

As a quick follow-up to my post this morning about the best elimination-game performances by total points and John Hollinger's "Game Score", I took commenter Mike G's advice and calculated single-game Win Shares for each player in an elimination game as well. Here are the Top 100 performances by WS since 1991 in a playoff game where the player's team was one loss away from going home for the summer:

Read the rest of this entry »