NBA

LeBron’s Path To The NBA’s All-Time Scoring Crown, In 2 Charts

By Neil Paine

Feb. 7, 2023, at 10:19 AM

While it has been far from a banner season for the Los Angeles Lakers, one bright spot has been LeBron James’s pursuit of an NBA record that was once considered unbreakable: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s all-time scoring mark of 38,387 career points. After James notched 27 points against the New Orleans Pelicans on Saturday, his lifetime tally of 38,352 sits just 35 points shy of Abdul-Jabbar’s record. 

Since James has scored at least 35 points in 11 of the 43 games he’s played this season (about 26 percent of the time), there is a decent chance he ties or breaks the record Tuesday night against the Oklahoma City Thunder — and he is all but certain to break it by Thursday’s game against the Milwaukee Bucks.¹ Although NBA players are usually measured more on championships and per-game output than raw totals, the scoring record will regardless be one of the shinier items on James’s long list of career accomplishments — one that truly underscores his longevity, durability and continued production, even at age 38 (and counting).

One way we can see this is by comparing James’s career points with Abdul-Jabbar’s over time, through each game of their careers. It may surprise contemporary fans to know that Abdul-Jabbar had more points through each and every game of their respective careers up until Game No. 1,120; the 33 points LeBron scored then, on Feb. 25, 2018, finally allowed him to overtake Abdul-Jabbar’s pace — and he’s never looked back since. While Abdul-Jabbar’s point total followed a gently arcing path during the late stages of his career, reflecting the normal career trajectory that sees a player’s production tail off as he ages, James’s total has steadily increased along roughly the same straight line it always has, perhaps even getting steeper in recent seasons as he approached the record number.

Thanks to his remarkable ability to defy Father Time, James should be able to chase down Abdul-Jabbar’s career scoring mark in about 150 fewer games than it took the great sky-hooking big man to originally compile it.

There is another important explanation for the difference in scoring pace between the two legends, however. By virtue of being able to skip college basketball and leap straight to the pros out of high school in 2003, James also got a sizable head start on Abdul-Jabbar, who played four years at UCLA (three on the varsity team) before being drafted No. 1 by the Milwaukee Bucks in 1969.² By the time James was the age Abdul-Jabbar was on the day of his NBA debut (22 years and 185 days), LeBron already had 8,439 career NBA points.

That’s also why, by the time Abdul-Jabbar got to James’s current total of 1,409 games, he was nearly two and a half years older than James is now, and his production was seriously slowing. But the head start of skipping college wasn’t exactly an automatic record-breaking cheat code for James, either. It’s worth pointing out that other preps-to-pros stars — such as Kobe Bryant, Kevin Garnett, Tracy McGrady and Dwight Howard — ran out of steam well before the age at which LeBron is currently maintaining his greatness. (Bryant was 37 years and 234 days old on the date of his 60-point career finale — about six months younger than James is right now.)

And besides, if his place on the timeline of basketball history gave James an advantage earlier generations lacked, it also gives him an opportunity. LeBron is currently averaging 30.0 points per game this season — well above his career average of 27.2 — and presumably has a number of good years left in the tank, especially if he plays into his 40s the way Abdul-Jabbar did. That will give him a unique chance to push the NBA's all-time scoring record to even greater heights: If Abdul-Jabbar left it in the stratosphere, James might leave it in the mesosphere or even the thermosphere. And that means this time, the record really, truly might be unbreakable for future generations of NBA stars.

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NBA

Aaron Gordon's Career-Year Recipe? All The Dunks.

By Jared Dubin

Feb. 3, 2023, at 8:00 AM

Typically, when an NBA player finally puts together the best season of his career, it’s the result of some sort of expansion in his game. He adds some stretch to his jumper, improves his ball-handling, finds the balance between scoring and playmaking, or at long last masters the nuances of team defense.

Such is not the case with Denver Nuggets forward Aaron Gordon, who in the ninth year of his career is doing the most, mostly by doing less than ever before. According to most all-in-one metrics, Gordon has been a top-30 player in the league this season: He checks in 23rd in Estimated Plus-Minus, 28th in ESPN’s Real Plus-Minus and 29th in FiveThirtyEight’s RAPTOR plus/minus — each of which peg him as being worth between 3.9 and 4.6 points per 100 possessions to the Nuggets’ scoring margin so far this season. In the cases of EPM and RAPTOR, the figures also are by far the best of Gordon’s career to date.

As mentioned, though, Gordon has achieved these results not through an increase in his role, but by narrowing its focus.

Back in 2016, when Gordon was still with the Orlando Magic, he practically gushed about the possibility of expanding his game under then-incoming head coach Frank Vogel. He told ESPN’s Zach Lowe, “I’m gonna be like a third guard. I’ll have a much bigger ball-handling responsibility, and I’m all for that.”

That’s a far cry from what he told The Denver Post last month: “If I need to hit threes, I’ll hit threes. If I need to post up, I’ll post up. If I need to make plays, I’ll make plays. If I need to just rebound and do dirty work and play defense, I’ll do that. I’m here to do anything that I can to help this team win a championship, to help [Nikola Jokić] win a championship, to help Jamal [Murray] win a championship, to help Michael Malone win a championship. That’s it. Winning is the end-all, be-all, so I’ll do whatever it takes to win.”

To his credit, Gordon has put his money where his mouth is. According to Second Spectrum tracking data, for example, Gordon has been directly involved in fewer actions per 100 possessions this season than at any time in his career.

The Nuggets hardly ever run plays for him. Instead, Gordon makes a living offensively by lurking on the edges of the action. He slices through the defense with perfectly-timed cuts. He has become extremely adept at ducking deep into the lane, sealing his man and giving Jokić a huge target to hit with a pass. When on the weak side, he spaces properly and punishes closing-out defenders by making quick shoot-pass-drive decisions.

And at the tail end of his plays, he finishes quite often with dunks. Sooooo many dunks. Like, an absurd number of dunks. So far this year, an incredible 27.8 percent of Gordon’s shot attempts have been dunks. How outlandish is that? Consider the following: Last season, when Gordon established a new career high with 130 slams (far surpassing his previous mark of 104, set back in 2018-19), dunks accounted for 17.3 percent of his shot attempts.

Gordon accumulated those 130 jams in 75 games, meaning he powered the ball through the rim 1.73 times per night. Again, that was his career high. So far this season, the Nuggets have played 52 games, of which Gordon has participated in 46. And he already has 125 (ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY FIVE!) dunks. That is almost a full dunk more per game (2.72) than he had last year. He’ll soon set a new career high once again, perhaps by the time you’re reading this sentence.

Unsurprisingly, a fair number of those dunks have been created by Jokić. According to Second Spectrum, no player has assisted a teammate on more dunks than the 60 on which Jokić has assisted Gordon.³ If those 60 dunks were Gordon’s only dunks of the season, he would still be tied with LeBron James and sit ahead of Jayson Tatum (57) in total dunks. That’s how often Jokić is finding Gordon for the easiest finishes. 

So it’s no wonder that this has been (by far) the most efficient shooting season of Gordon’s career: Shots within 3 feet of the basket (i.e., dunks and layups) make up a majority of his attempts for the first time ever, while he now rarely attempts long or even medium-length midrange shots.

Gordon has benefited greatly from being attached to Jokić in the Nuggets’ rotation. Denver used to match Jokić and Murray, but the chemistry between Jokić and Gordon has led to a change, and you now rarely see Gordon on the floor without the two-time reigning MVP. He has been on the floor sans Jokić for just 16.1 percent of his minutes played this season, according to PBP Stats, and a significant share of those minutes have come in the games when Jokić has sat out.

It makes sense that Denver would pair the duo together. The Nuggets have absolutely demolished their opponents with Jokić and Gordon on the floor at the same time. Across 1,165 minutes, they have a plus-14.3 net rating, according to PBP Stats. That’s compared with plus-3.5 in Jokić-only minutes, plus-3.0 in Gordon-only minutes, and minus-12.9 in the minutes with both on the bench.

The reason they fit so well is that they accentuate each other’s strengths while mitigating each other’s weaknesses. When Gordon was tasked with creating his own offense, his efficiency suffered. But there is perhaps no greater creator of efficient offense in the league today than Jokić, and he has weaponized Gordon as an elite play-finisher.

Meanwhile, Jokić is not a particularly mobile, nimble or versatile defender. But Gordon is one of the NBA’s most athletic players, and one who can handle just about any defensive assignment the Nuggets throw his way. According to Bball-Index, Gordon ranks 37th out of 306 players who have played 500 or more minutes this season in Matchup Difficulty, and is one of just 25 players who has guarded point guards, shooting guards, small forwards, power forwards and centers on at least 12 percent of his half-court defensive possessions each. He’s also one of just seven players⁴ who appears on both of those lists.

That type of synergy between frontcourt players is enviable, and it makes Gordon fit like a glove alongside the most important player on his team. His versatile skill set also means he can fit equally as well alongside Denver’s supersized 3-point sniper Michael Porter Jr. as he does with miniature Swiss Army knife Bruce Brown. He and Kentavious Caldwell-Pope can smother opposing scorers. He and Brown and Bones Hyland can get out on the break, while he and Murray can provide disparately challenging inverted pick-and-roll partners for Jokić. Michael Malone has been reluctant to use Gordon as a small-ball center (only 15 non-garbage-time possessions this season, according to Cleaning the Glass), but probably could against certain opponents if he wanted to. 

Such is the benefit of a player with Gordon’s skill and athleticism and, now, willingness to do whatever is asked of him. While his All-Star candidacy ultimately fell short, that doesn't diminish what he's accomplished this year. It sometimes takes a while for hyper-competent role players on contenders to get their recognition, after all. But if Gordon continues to play at this level, the Nuggets will continue to win — and the accolades will eventually follow. Even if they don't, there's something to be said for recognizing that the best way you can contribute is by doing only the things you do best, as best as you can, and then doing exactly that.

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NBA

Rudy Gobert Was Supposed To Take The T-Wolves To The Next Level. Why Isn't It Working?

By Andres Waters

Jan. 25, 2023, at 6:00 AM

After making just their second playoff appearance in nearly 20 years, the Minnesota Timberwolves entered full win-now mode with a blockbuster trade during the offseason — sending five players and four first-round picks to the Utah Jazz in exchange for superstar center Rudy Gobert. The expectation was that pairing Gobert with fellow All-Star big Karl-Anthony Towns would form a dominant frontcourt duo and allow the franchise to continue its ascent. 

While there’s still a chance that could happen, that has yet to be the case for Minnesota (24-25). Just past the midpoint of the season, the team sits ninth in the Western Conference and has hovered around .500 practically all season. While competing in the middle of the pack was viewed as a sign of progress for this team last season, that’s no longer the case after last season’s success and the acquisition of a player as decorated as Gobert.

In an interview after the trade, Gobert said his goal was to compete for a championship with this team. But how has the trade affected his play on the court? And has his addition to the team actually made the Timberwolves any better?

At first glance, Gobert’s performance this season appears comparable to what he did with Utah in the past. He’s averaging a double-double in points (13.3) and rebounds (11.6) while also recording over one block (1.3) per game. He’s also shooting 67.8 percent from the field, which ranks second-best in the NBA. But with a closer look, you’ll find that this has been one of the worst statistical seasons of the big man’s 10-year career.  

Gobert’s 13.3 points per game are the second-fewest he’s averaged since taking over as a full-time starter for the Jazz in 2014-15. And his 1.3 blocks and 0.8 assists per game are the fewest he has posted since his rookie season. If that holds up, this would be the only season since his rookie year that Gobert didn’t average at least two blocks per game. (It also would be the first year that he didn’t finish among the top 10 in the league in the category.)

Moreover, Gobert’s on-court impact has been surprisingly limited. After posting a career-best RAPTOR plus/minus of +7.8 in 2020-21 and following that up with a strong +6.9 mark last year, his RAPTOR is down to +1.7 this season — the second-worst performance of his career (again, ahead of only his rookie year). And according to NBA Advanced Stats, we’ve never seen a more porous Gobert-led defensive effort. Minnesota’s defensive efficiency rating with Gobert on the court, 108.7, is the worst that he’s ever had, and his team’s -1.2 net rating while he’s in the game is the lowest since his rookie season. 

Those are not exactly the results a team would expect when trading for a three-time defensive player of the year, particularly given what the T-Wolves’ needs were coming into the season. 

Last year, Minnesota had one of the best offenses in the NBA, leading the league in points per game, and the team also posted a top-10 offensive efficiency rating (114.3). But it was also among the worst defensive teams, giving up 113.3 points a night — the seventh-most in the NBA last season. One of the main goals of the Gobert deal was to improve at that end of the court.

Since trading for Gobert, Minnesota has taken a step back offensively, which — to an extent — was to be expected. The biggest knock on the French big man has been his limited offensive game. Although the team is scoring nearly the exact same amount of points per game this year (115.3), which would have been tied for the fourth-most last season, the league has caught up. This season, Minnesota is ranked 11th in points per game, and the team has fallen to 20th in offensive efficiency (113.6). But the surprising part is the lack of improvement Minnesota has shown on defense. Even with Gobert playing 40 out of a possible 49 games, the team is allowing the league’s 11th-most points (115.6), only a four-spot improvement from last year. And its defensive efficiency rating is actually worse this season, rising from 111.2 to 113.4.

With the addition of Gobert, the thought was that pairing a defense-minded big with a skilled, shooting big like Towns would allow both players to make up for each other’s deficiencies, but that simply hasn’t been the case so far. Before Towns was forced to miss time due to a calf injury, the two weren’t even among the Timberwolves’ top two-man lineups. Of the 19 pairs to log 400 or more minutes on the court together this season, Gobert and Towns have the worst offensive rating (106.6) and the seventh-worst net rating (-0.7).

Minnesota’s new big man hasn’t been much better with the team’s other young star, Anthony Edwards, either: The pair also has a -0.7 net rating when sharing the floor. And in the limited time that all three stars are on the court together, the production has been mixed. While it has been one of the team’s better defensive combos, posting a 106.6 defensive rating (second-best among three-man units on the team this season), the Gobert-Towns-Edwards trio has been the second-worst offensively of any three-man lineup with more than 350 minutes together this season (with a 107.4 offensive rating). That has led the trio’s overall net rating to just barely break-even (+0.8 points per 100 possessions) despite its abundance of talent.

It’s still too early to tell whether this newly formed Timberwolves core can eventually be good enough to play at the championship level Gobert referred to before the season. But it is clearly off to a bad start, and it is concerning that the big-ticket acquisition of Gobert has yet to make the team much better … if at all.

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NBA

How NBA Teams Are Bringing The Post-Up Back To Life

By Louis Zatzman

Jan. 24, 2023, at 6:00 AM

The NBA is in the midst of an offensive explosion, with 14 of the best 15 historical offensive ratings for teams coming in the past four seasons. The Boston Celtics currently boast the third-best offensive rating in NBA history,⁵ and like so many teams in the new, high-scoring NBA, they do it in part by overloading the floor with shooting. Though they’ve cooled a bit from deep since the start of the season, they’re one of only 13 teams in history to attempt at least 40 triples per game, and they’re connecting on 37.1 percent with four rotation players⁶ over 40 percent.

Why, then, in crunch time of their Nov. 14 game against the Oklahoma City Thunder — to take just one example — did the Celtics opt to utilize MVP candidate Jayson Tatum on a post-up, far inside the 3-point arc, executing what many consider an outdated and obsolete type of play? 

For one reason, it was because Tatum is one of the game’s best overall scorers and was guarded in single-coverage by the opponent’s point guard. (It also worked: Tatum used his body to create space, took one dribble and pivoted to the rim for the inside-hand layup, helping the Celtics eventually grab the W.) But there’s another good reason: Because post-ups are actually the most efficient play in basketball. 

How did posting up go from “deader than dead” to the NBA’s best play? And does this mean big men are really having their revival at long last? (While centers may have been the purveyors of post-up buckets in decades past, forwards have actually surpassed them in post-up frequency — perhaps giving credence to Dr. James Naismith’s original positional conception of “forward” being the main attacking position.) 

Still, we should pump the brakes a bit on any notion that the days of Patrick Ewing and Hakeem Olajuwon are upon us once again. Perhaps the most rudimentary explanation for the renewed success of the post-up is a form of selection bias: The play is now reserved mostly for those who do it best. Post-ups occur only 5.887 times per 100 possessions, and the 20 players with the most post-ups on the season combine for nearly half (43.6 percent) of the league’s total post-ups. Nikola Jokić accounts for an absurd 4.7 percent of leaguewide post-ups on his own. Only four teams, excluding the Denver Nuggets themselves, have posted up more than Jokić on his own this season,⁷ and he scores 1.263 points per chance on such plays. (The best offense in the league scores 1.065 points per chance.) 

As a point of comparison, the 20 players with the most pick-and-rolls in the league combine for just over a quarter (26.9 percent) of the league’s total pick and rolls, per Second Spectrum. If the NBA’s pick-and-roll leaders — Luka Dončić, for example, scoring 1.124 points per chance on pick and rolls — contributed more significantly to the total share of such plays, the play type would be more successful than its current 0.979 points per chance (but of course, it would also be used at a much lower frequency per 100 possessions). 

Thinking about post-ups in a vacuum, however, misses what makes them so valuable in the current NBA. The league is shifting away from static plays of any kind, and toward a fluid state of multiple actions layered on top of one another. The post-up as a primary playcall, with a ball handler dribbling downcourt and dumping the ball into the post, where a center promptly battles another center before shooting, is finished; that precise sequence has happened only twice this season.⁸

Post-ups are now becoming dynamic. The percentage of post-ups that have featured a positional mismatch — with a center defended by a guard or forward (or a forward defended by a guard) — has increased from approximately one-quarter in 2013-14 to just over half this season, per Second Spectrum. Those mismatches have to come from somewhere, and such advantages can be created by other events on the court — like pick and rolls or handoffs — before being converted into points via the post.

The dropping frequency of the post-up has coincided with the rise of the hand-off. Similar to picks, approximately a quarter of hand-offs result in switches this season, creating a potentially advantageous mismatch. (Less than 10 percent of hand-offs were switched by the defense in 2013-14.) And as leaguewide frequency for post-ups has plummeted by almost 6 plays per 100 possessions from 2013-14 to today, hand-off frequency has increased by almost 8 plays per 100 possessions. But a post-up can flow out of a hand-off, especially after the defense is forced to switch or rotate or open up some other weakness. 

At the bare minimum, using a pick-and-roll and/or a hand-off to flow into a post-up can make sure that help defenders are as far away from the offensive player as possible, giving him plenty of time to work alone in the post.

There are correlations between the players who are best at posting up, those best at hand-offs and their teams’ offensive efficiency. Jokić and Sacramento Kings center Domantas Sabonis are two of the league’s most efficient and frequent post players, and so too are they the two most frequent hand-off providers. And both of their teams currently rank among the top 5 highest offensive ratings in history. 

One common thread is that Jokić and Sabonis are brilliant scorers and passers; using them in either capacity out of the post is a good tactic. That’s not unusual: Across the league, possessions with passes coming out of the post carry practically the same efficiency as possessions seeing shots coming off of post-ups. For today’s multi-talented bigs, the post can be used as a vehicle between every kind of event on the court, rather than an end in and of itself.

And yet, in the entirety of Second Spectrum’s database (beginning in 2013-14), 2022-23’s post-ups are the both most efficient play type on record and the least frequent. In fact, post-ups have been the most efficient and least frequent play type in every season in the database other than 2013-14 (when it was the most efficient and second-least frequent play type).

There is an inherent tension in a play slowly growing in efficiency yet shrinking in usage. Are teams now using post-ups too infrequently? Will there be diminishing returns if they’re used more often again? With (most) teams in the league maximizing efficiency and applying Moneyball principles to the NBA, there must exist to some extent a relative “objective” equilibrium between frequency and efficiency of individual play types.

Other factors impacting where such an equilibrium might settle haven’t shifted dramatically for the past few seasons. While 3-point attempts have generally been on the rise over the past few decades in the NBA, they’ve been stable for the last four seasons. So too has 3-point accuracy and pace. 

But unless the rules change, or post-up artists like Jokić and Sabonis lose their skills to alien invaders in a real-life Space Jam situation, it’s hard to see plays in the post becoming less efficient. More likely, their frequency could rise at some point. And wings like Tatum are perhaps the next frontier in the post-up’s reclamation of offensive attention. The Toronto Raptors last season went all-in on non-big post-ups. Wings like DeMar DeRozan have long been post-up wizards. But as post-ups are becoming tools to punish mismatches created elsewhere, or a means of chaining together events like hand-offs and pick-and-rolls, the wing’s ability in the post will be an important tool in any necromantic resurrection of the play.

The day of the post-up receiving the first billing is likely done; no realistic amount of equilibrium shift can undo so many years of tactical evolution. Teams can certainly turn to the post for simple, static buckets at times — like the Celtics did with Tatum against the Thunder. And it’s important to remember that modern NBA offensive sets are often in flux, with multiple pieces flowing together like a complex ballet. How post-ups can fit into the theater around them, as finishing moments to exploit mismatches or as continuation events to move players or the ball across the floor, is changing. There are now many advantageous uses for the post-up in the NBA. And as its efficiency continues to rise, teams are poised to recommit to more and more of them. 

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NBA Stars Are Stuffing Stat Sheets Like Never Before. But Why?

By Santul Nerkar

Jan. 20, 2023, at 6:00 AM

It’s usually a special occasion when LeBron James has one of his patented statistical eruptions. In Monday’s victory over the Houston Rockets, James notched a hyper-efficient 48 points, to go with eight rebounds, nine assists and zero turnovers. It was an eye-popping output to help carry his short-handed Los Angeles Lakers — even from the player who keeps defying Father Time. 

But in this NBA season — and the modern NBA more generally — LeBron’s explosion was just another piece in the league’s big-game puzzle. Several weeks earlier, Luka Dončić posted the NBA’s second 60-point triple double ever, and then followed that up with a 51-6-9 stat line four days later. Two nights after that, Cleveland Cavaliers guard Donovan Mitchell poured in 71(!) points against Michael Jordan’s former team — more than MJ himself ever mustered in a game — to go with eight rebounds and 11 assists. And one day after that, Milwaukee Bucks forward Giannis Antetokounmpo went for a comparatively tame 55 points, 10 rebounds and seven assists.

These are just a few of the gaudy performances that have seemingly come a dime a dozen in the NBA this season … and it’s not clear when they’ll stop. In fact, we can demonstrate this visually. Using Basketball-Reference.com’s Game Score metric (which measures single-game statistical output using all of a player’s box score numbers), you can see that the average team leader⁹ in game-by-game performance per 100 possessions has never been stuffing the stat sheet better in modern NBA history:

Critically, at this point in the season (more than halfway in), this overall mark implies that it’s not just one-off herculean performances like those of James, Dončić and Mitchell clouding our perception that individual player outputs are getting bigger and bigger. And it’s not just scoring, either: Though points hold the biggest weight in Game Score’s calculation,¹⁰ it accounts for a number of other statistics as well, including rebounds, assists, steals, turnovers and more. 

So what might explain all of these individual statistical explosions sweeping across the league? And is it sustainable?

The easiest and most obvious answer to this recent uptick in top players’ raw output is that NBA offenses, as a whole, have never been better. The league’s collective offensive efficiency of 114.0 is the highest it’s been since at least the merger, as teams have moved to trim the fat out of their scoring diets, focusing on the choicest shots both inside and outside the 3-point arc. Outside of the occasional rule-breakers, NBA teams have found that winning basketball lies not just beyond the 3-point arc … but deep inside it, too.

According to Cleaning the Glass, teams are taking just 30.8 percent of their shots from the midrange, including just 9.4 percent from the long midrange, the latter of which is the lowest figure since at least the 2003-04 season. But it doesn’t appear as if the most recent uptick in offensive efficiency has been due to teams shooting more threes. Overall 3-point attempt rates have stabilized in 2023, but teams are taking a higher share of their attempts at the rim — and making more — than they did last season. 

What that may mean for the NBA’s stars, then, is that they have had more room to operate and are using it to great effect. As The Athletic’s Mike Prada noted recently, the effect of the 3-point revolution hasn’t just been on threes, but on all the other shots that have gotten easier with defenses needing to focus on the arc. Stars are still getting the same shots they got in past seasons, but they’ve never been better optimized to convert them so efficiently.

From the lens of player usage, too, it seems apparent that teams are asking their stars to burn brighter than ever — a not-so-surprising development in the heliocentric age of basketball that we live in — to the tune of three of the 10 highest Game Scores since the merger coming during the first half of the 2022-23 season alone. Not coincidentally, Antetokounmpo, Dončić and Joel Embiid are on pace this season to own three of the 10 highest usage rates in modern NBA history, too.

Playing time may also help explain why someone like Dončić has excelled — he’s No. 2 in minutes per game played this season — but even he’s not playing absurdly high minutes by historical standards, as his mark of 37.4 wouldn’t crack the top 200 of minutes per game played this century. It’s more about what Dončić and players of his ilk are being asked to do within those minutes, and how many eye-popping numbers they continue to put up on a night-by-night basis.

Of course, it’s not at all clear that this surge of individual box score power correlates to helping a team win. One notable holdout to the age of heliocentrism, perennial MVP candidate Nikola Jokić, hasn’t quite caught the attention of the traditional stat-stuffing metrics this season. Despite leading the league in FiveThirtyEight’s RAPTOR wins above replacement, Jokić’s average Game Score comes in just a hair below 26.0 per game, well below the average for an NBA star this season. And the track record of teams built around high-usage superstars isn’t a great one. Michael Jordan, who posted a 34.7 percent usage rate (good for 43rd all time) during his 1992-93 season with the Chicago Bulls, is the highest-usage player to win a championship since the merger. So with three of the game’s preeminent stars posting otherworldly usage rates — Dončić and Antetokounmpo at 38.2 and Embiid at 38.0 — we’re about to get a real test of whether modern basketball’s extreme heliocentric model can finally win in 2023.

But on a certain level, perhaps none of that matters. As the saying goes, big box scores do not lie, and the NBA’s biggest stars have irrefutably treated us to the best collective leading performances in the league’s history so far this year. When a 48-point barrage at age 38 by arguably the greatest player of all time is treated as an afterthought, you know the bar for individual excellence has been raised. 

Neil Paine contributed research.

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Jaren Jackson Jr. Is The Defensive Player Of The Year Front-Runner — But He Wouldn't Be A Typical Winner

By Jared Dubin

Jan. 12, 2023, at 6:00 AM

Now in his fifth NBA season, Memphis Grizzlies forward Jaren Jackson Jr. has fully blossomed into the player the team envisioned he would be when it selected him with the No. 4 overall pick in the 2018 NBA draft. He’s averaging career highs in points and rebounds per minute, and setting new marks in scoring efficiency as well, with one of the league’s best true shooting percentages (.618).¹¹

But Jackson isn’t known primarily for his offense. First and foremost, he is a full-fledged defensive monster, a player whose combination of size, length, agility and instincts is nearly unmatched leaguewide. It’s no accident that the Grizz ranked just 19th in the NBA in defensive rating before Jackson’s return from offseason foot surgery, according to NBA Advanced Stats, and are first by nearly 2 full points per 100 possessions since he got back. 

It is also no accident that Jackson is, at the moment, the deserving front-runner to take home the Defensive Player of the Year trophy. But his candidacy for the award would follow a very different path than other winners from over the years, making him one of the most unique and interesting defensive anchors the league has seen in recent seasons.

Of course, in many ways, Jackson would be a pretty conventional DPOY winner. He’s the best defender on what is right now the best defensive team in the NBA, for example. The team with the league’s best defensive rating has produced seven previous DPOY winners, and the average rank in defensive rating for the eventual trophy-getter’s team has been 4.2. Not since Marcus Camby in 2007 has the winner come from a team ranked outside the top five in defensive rating, and that was one of only nine times in 40 seasons where that’s happened.

Jackson also leads the NBA in blocks per game (3.3) — or at least he would, if he qualified for per-game leaderboards. While the blocks leader hasn’t claimed the trophy since Dwight Howard in 2010, it used to happen fairly often before more advanced measurements of defense became popularized. One of those more advanced measurements is defensive estimated plus-minus, or defensive EPM, where the winner has ranked inside the top five in six of the past nine seasons. Jackson currently ranks first. The winner also has ranked inside the top 10 in defensive RAPTOR in eight of nine seasons, and Jackson currently ranks ninth.¹²

Like the archetypal DPOY winner of yore, Jackson is a hulking menace of a help defender, standing always at the ready to block, corral or otherwise deter opponents when they dare venture into the paint. According to Second Spectrum, 60 NBA players have provided support against 200 or more opponent drives so far this season. Jackson ranks first among that group in points allowed per possession when the play is finished by the driver or a teammate one pass away.

His timing as a shot-blocker is outstanding, and bordering on surreal. He makes ridiculous plays look routine, with stunning regularity:

Jackson led the NBA with a 7.4 percent block rate last season, but is absolutely demolishing that mark this year by swatting away 11.3 (ELEVEN POINT THREE!) percent of opponent 2-point shot attempts while on the floor. He doesn’t yet qualify for league leaderboards, but considering Nic Claxton is currently the NBA “leader” with the block rate of a mere mortal at 8 percent, it’s safe to say that once Jackson does qualify (which should happen within the next couple of weeks), he will again take residence atop the list. He’s fresh off blocking five shots in each end of a back-to-back against the Jazz and Spurs, and entered Wednesday having blocked at least three in six consecutive games.

There are, however, several reasons that Jackson actually claiming the hardware at the end of the season would be highly unusual.

First, there’s his age. The average Defensive Player of the Year has been 27.6 years old, while Jackson is only in his age-23 season.¹³ If he were to win the award, he’d tie Kawhi Leonard (2014-15), Dwight Howard (2008-09) and Alvin Robertson (1985-86) as the youngest Defensive Player of the Year in history.¹⁴

Next, there’s his availability. Jackson sat out Memphis’s first 14 games of the season while recovering from the aforementioned foot surgery, and has sat out twice more since then. Even if he were to play in every Grizzlies game for the rest of the year, he would then have played in 80.5 percent of possible games. The average DPOY has appeared in 94 percent of his team’s games, with only Leonard in 2015 (78 percent) and Rudy Gobert in 2018 (68.3 percent) failing to crack the 80 percent mark.

Finally, there’s his minutes load. The average historical Defensive Player of the Year has been on the court for 35.1 minutes per game. Jackson’s mere 26.3 minutes per game average would be by far the lowest for any player awarded this trophy. Not since Dennis Rodman got 29.0 minutes of per-game floor time in 1990 has a DPOY played fewer than 30 minutes a night, and the only other time it has happened was in 1987, when Michael Cooper played 27.5 per game.

One of several reasons Jackson’s playing time is so low is because of his pesky foul habit. He’s been whistled for 3.0 rule-violations per game despite his light workload — an extremely high figure. It would be a rarity for a player to foul so often and still win Defensive Player of the Year.

The award has been handed out 40 times, and only once has the victor fouled more often per minute than Jackson. (Dennis Rodman fouled 4.2 times per 36 minutes during the 1989-90 season, while Jackson is at 4.1 per 36 this year.) Even accounting for pace of play, just two prior Defensive Players of the Year have fouled more often on a per-possession basis than Jackson has so far this season (5.4 per 100 possessions): Rodman in 1989-90 (5.9 per 100) and Alonzo Mourning in 1999-2000 (6.0 per 100).

It makes a lot of sense that this would be the case. Fouls are damaging not just because they can result in the offending player being taken off the floor, but because they give opponents their easiest opportunities for points. Sending a player to the line for free shots is just about the worst thing a defender can do on any given possession. A player who fouls as often as Jackson thus has to provide a ton of value outside of those violations just to avoid being a negative defender, let alone one of the best in the NBA. Luckily for the Grizzlies, Jackson does just that — and not just with his shot-blocking.

He’s one of the most effective defenders against the league’s favorite tactic. Opponents have managed just 0.886 points per play on pick and rolls where Jackson defended the screener and the play was finished by the ball handler or a teammate one pass away, according to Second Spectrum. That ranks in the 91st percentile among the 113 players who have defended 200 ball screens or more. His athleticism allows him to handle perimeter players in space, and his size and length make it difficult for them to access the paint and especially the rim. Using his man to set a screen away from the ball isn’t any more fruitful: He ranks in the 92nd percentile among 79 players who have defended 200 or more off-ball picks.

Trying to score on Jackson in isolation? Again, he is among the top 10 percent of defenders who have defended 40 or more of them this season. Want to test him at the basket? Best of luck. There are 113 players who have challenged at least 3 shots per game, according to NBA Advanced Stats, and Jackson ranks first among that group in field goal percentage allowed (41.5 percent) when within 5 feet of both the shooter and the rim. The next-closest player is Draymond Green, more than 6 percentage points away.

The big question with Jackson at this point is whether he can stay healthy. Last season was ironically his best yet from a health standpoint, as he played 78 of 82 games. But foot injuries (like the stress fracture for which he required surgery following said season) traditionally do not pair well with players of Jackson’s size (he’s listed at 6-foot-11), and he’s also dealt with multiple knee issues, including a torn meniscus. His activity level and somewhat slight frame will likely always be cause for concern, especially given his history. 

Long-term, that might be an issue the Grizzlies have to reckon with. In the immediate and near future, though, Jackson’s game-changing presence as a defender helps solidify his team as one of the league’s elite — and it puts him in the driver’s seat to win an award not many players with his experience or resume can say they’ve placed in the trophy case.

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NBA

Nikola Jokić's MVP Case Is Hidden In Plain Sight (Again)

By Santul Nerkar

Jan. 4, 2023, at 6:00 AM

Nikola Jokić has a tendency to make the spectacular look mundane. Take this play during the third quarter of a recent game against the Boston Celtics, just one of the 40,904 passes he’s slung as a member of the Denver Nuggets. With a running start near the top of the key, Jokić took one brisk dribble into the paint, left his feet, twirled and fired a short overhead feed to a cutting Michael Porter Jr., who scored through contact to extend the Denver lead to 13.

It also epitomized the unorthodox brilliance of Jokić: A 6-foot-11, lumbering giant of basketball who dominates the game as a generational scorer and passer without needing the ball in his hands for more than a split second. And with his Nuggets finally sporting a clean bill of health and built to contend for the Western Conference crown, Jokić has a strong claim to going only where Bill Russell, Wilt Chamberlain and Larry Bird have gone, by bringing home a third consecutive MVP — voter fatigue be damned. 

Let’s start with the topline numbers, which might not immediately scream “MVP.” The Joker is averaging 25.6 points, 10.8 rebounds and 9.5 assists per game, of which only his assists are a marked improvement over his lofty MVP standards, while shooting 62 percent from the field, 35 percent from 3-point range and 81 percent from the free-throw line. But the advanced stats, as they have been wont to do with Jokić, paint a rosier picture: According to FiveThirtyEight’s NBA player ratings, Jokić is second in offensive RAPTOR, third in defensive RAPTOR and leads the league in both total RAPTOR and RAPTOR wins above replacement. He’s also third in the league in true shooting percentage, thanks in large part to a career-best 66 percent mark from 2-point range.

But perhaps more impressive and groundbreaking than Jokić’s numbers is just how he’s coming about them — and that’s at the heart of his post-postscript MVP case. The Joker is having one of the best “invisible” all-around seasons ever, as he’s just one of three players to average at least 25 points and eight assists per game with a usage rate of less than 30 percent. Throw in a true-shooting mark of 68.7 percent, good for third-best in the NBA, and you have arguably the most quietly lethal offensive season of the modern era:

Jokić’s case for basketball immortality also flies in the face of the NBA’s turn toward “heliocentrism,” wherein one player has come to dominate more and more of his team’s possessions. Compare Jokić’s usage rate of 28.5 percent to that of the Dallas Mavericks’ Luka Dončić, who sports an absurdly high usage rate of 38.4 percent and is one of the front-runners for this season’s MVP. And somehow, that’s not even the league-leading figure, as two-time MVP Giannis Antetokounmpo boasts a usage rate of 38.6 percent. In fact, Jokić ranks 24th in usage this season, behind a bevy of MVP contenders and even second fiddles such as Boston forward Jaylen Brown.

As it stands, despite his otherworldly impact on the basketball court, Jokić would become the least heliocentric MVP (according to usage rate) since Tim Duncan in 2002-03:

Now, “invisible” might seem like an odd adjective to describe one of the most immovable and impactful figures in the NBA — and when you watch the Nuggets play, Jokić is very much the proverbial sun around which the Nuggets offense revolves. With the Joker on the floor, Denver has an offensive rating of 122.7, equivalent not only to the best NBA offense this season, but the greatest offense in recorded history. With Jokić off the court, however, Denver’s offensive rating falls to a ghastly 101.6, which would be dead last in the NBA this season and the worst figure since the 2015-16 season. The impact is felt on defense, too, where the Nuggets are 3.2 points per 100 possessions worse with Jokić off the court vs. on. So though the Nuggets may not appear heliocentric, their sun is as important to his team’s ecosystem as any celestial body in the NBA universe, even as he emits seemingly duller rays than Dončić, Antetokounmpo or vintage James Harden. 

But how does Jokić exactly manage to command an all-time great squad when his workload doesn’t appear to be as great as those stars? One illustration lies in how long he holds the ball — and what he does when he has it. According to NBA Advanced Stats, Jokić averages 100 touches per game, the most in the league this season, but his average time per touch ranks just 69th out of 103 players who average at least 30 minutes per game. Moreover, unlike assist rivals like Trae Young and Dončić, who average 5.70 and 5.64 dribbles per touch, Jokić doesn’t pound the air out of the ball, averaging just 1.41 dribbles per touch. That number is right next to those of players like Buddy Hield and De’Andre Hunter, both of whom are below-average passers for their position — not the company we would expect arguably the greatest passer of all time to keep. 

In other words, Jokić sees and processes the game so quickly that he doesn’t need to take much time deciding what to do. Which might be why, among the 117 players with 1,500 or more touches this season, Jokić has generated the most points per chance (1.143). And as Ben Taylor of Thinking Basketball argued in a recent breakdown, what makes Jokić such a great passer isn’t just his preternatural vision, but the subtle elements of his throws that squeeze every last bit of offensive potential out of their receiver. Jokić will twist the ball into angles you didn’t know existed, through windows that you didn’t know were open and along alleyways that seem like graveyards for possessions. And, of course, even if you shut down those thoroughfares, you have to account for his capacity to make the most maddening shot in NBA history: the “Sombor Shuffle.”

None of the two-time MVP’s nonconformist skills, of course, are new to NBA fans. But what is a welcome development in the Mile High City this season is the growth of Jokić’s supporting cast. After more than a season of missing action after a torn ACL, Jamal Murray is ramping back into the form he displayed during multiple playoff runs as Jokić’s right-hand man. Upgrades at the wing position and the growth of young players like Bones Hyland offer room for optimism as well — though the aforementioned non-Jokić minutes continue to plague Denver. All of that has led to perhaps the feather in the cap of Jokić’s MVP case: the Nuggets’ current perch atop the West. (As of now, FiveThirtyEight’s model projects Denver to wind up with the second-best record in the West, behind the Memphis Grizzlies.)

There’s a good reason why Jokić might not climb the MVP mountain for the third straight season, even if he keeps up his torrid pace through April. Voter fatigue is a real thing, and heading into the 2022-23 NBA season, few prognosticators thought Jokić could be even better than he was in his first two award-winning seasons — thought to be a prerequisite for three-peating. And yet, there’s the Joker, back in the thick of the race for the Greatest Player on Earth, shuffling and barely dribbling at the high post as he slow-cooks another defense. No, you’re not “lazy,” as Nuggets coach Michael Malone put it recently, if you want new blood for the award. You just might not see the most invisible superstar in the NBA.

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NBA

The Sacramento Kings' Offense Is Playoff-Worthy

But can the team end the longest postseason drought in NBA history?

By Jared Dubin

Dec. 16, 2022, at 6:00 AM

After a come-from-behind victory over the Toronto Raptors on Wednesday night, the Sacramento Kings — yes, the Kings — have a 15-12 record, tied for the 11th-best mark in the NBA. Sacramento’s record is backed up by its point differential, and there are even indications that its performance to date has been better than 11th-best: The Kings have the league’s eighth-best scoring margin when adjusting for pace and for opponent strength.

It wouldn’t normally be all that notable when a team looks pretty good about a quarter of the way through the NBA season, but the Kings currently own not just the league’s longest active playoff drought (16 seasons), but also the longest drought in NBA history. So, any sign that the streak might be coming to an end is worth investigating.

To that end, our RAPTOR-based prediction model now gives the Kings a 49 percent chance of making the playoffs.¹⁵ That’s up from 13 percent in the preseason model, and the 36 percentage point jump is the largest for any team so far this season. Sacramento’s projected record of 42-40 is 11 wins better than its preseason projection, and its plus-0.5 projected per-game point differential is up 4.1 points. Both of those figures are also the most-improved in the league to date.

The Kings have gotten here largely on the strength of their offense, which ranks sixth in the NBA in points per 100 possessions. Said offense has been powered by star-level performances from De’Aaron Fox and Domantas Sabonis, who this year — finally, at long last — are surrounded by a wave of 3-point snipers.

As we noted in our free-agency round-up this summer:

The Sacramento Kings went out and got two sharpshooters to supplement their De’Aaron Fox-Domantas Sabonis combination. One is Malik Monk, who used a strong contract run with the Lakers to secure himself a two-year deal and reunite with Fox, his former college teammate at Kentucky. Monk emerged as a good small-man pick-and-roll screener last season alongside LeBron James, and while the Kings don’t have anybody like LeBron (duh), Sacramento should be able to leverage Monk’s shooting to provide driving space for Fox and to make sweet dribble-hand-off music with Sabonis. The other is former Hawk Kevin Huerter, who figures to slide into the starting lineup and play a similar role to the one he had in Atlanta.

That’s indeed how things have played out for those two players (more on them in a minute), but it’s notable that they’re not alone in letting it fly from the outside. Fox arrived in Sacramento in 2017, and prior to this year, the Kings never had more than two players attempt at least six threes per 36 minutes in a season during his tenure.¹⁶ So far this season, they have six such players — including Fox himself — and that sextet has connected on a combined 37.1 percent of its attempts from beyond the arc. (This is despite Monk shooting only 35 percent after a recent cold stretch, compared with his 40.1 and 39.1 percent marks in each of the past two seasons.)

Having the extra space to operate in has made Fox a more effective driver. Among the 51 players averaging at least 10 forays per game, according to NBA Advanced Stats, Fox ranks seventh in field-goal percentage off of drives (57.2 percent). That’s a career-best mark, and up more than 5 percentage points from last season. And Fox hasn’t just been shooting more effectively; he’s also making better shoot-pass decisions when he gets into or near the paint.

Speedy guards tend to reach a point in their careers where they realize they don’t have to go full-bore all the time, and are better off modulating to keep defenders off balance. To say Fox first reached that point this season would be false; he’s been adjusting his speed for years now. But he appears to have better control of the speedometer than ever before, as well as a better handle on when to put the pedal to the metal and when to ease off a bit.

The Kings play at the NBA’s fifth-fastest pace, but according to Second Spectrum, no team in the league has gotten the ball over the half-court line faster on an average possession (3.75 seconds), which in turn has meant that no team in the league has seen opposing defenses pick up their lead ball handler closer to the rim (35 feet, nearly 3½ feet closer than the league average). The closer you are to the basket, the easier it is to score — or at least to threaten an easy score, draw help and then spray the ball to one of the aforementioned shooters dotting the perimeter.

On half-court possessions, the Kings also have the benefit of being able to throw the ball down to Sabonis on the block, where he is absolutely bulldozing opponents. During the player-tracking era (which began with the 2013-14 season), there have been 592 instances of a player posting up at least 100 times in a given campaign. Among that group, Sabonis’ post-ups this season have yielded the fourth-most points per possession (1.355).

Monk told The Ringer’s Michael Pina that Sabonis, “actually looks to pass first, more than normal,” when in the post. “More than he should, sometimes. That’s what makes him so hard to guard.” Not that it should be surprising, but Monk is dead on when analyzing his teammate’s post-up tendencies. Among the same group of 592 players, Sabonis’s rate of 0.373 passes per direct post-up¹⁷ ranks 32nd, just outside the top 5 percent.

Sabonis told Pina that the team’s efforts to surround him and Fox with shooting have made life easier in the post. “If they double-team me, it’s easier for me to kick out and [they] knock it down. Then they’re [also] more worried to double.” Sacramento has scored a ridiculous 1.418 points per possession when Sabonis passes out of the post, a rate that ranks 14th out of the 360 instances in the past decade where a player has thrown at least 50 post-up passes.

Sabonis also operates as a dribble hand-off hub for Sacramento, which gets more out of that action than any team in the NBA. The Kings have scored 877 points out of hand-offs this season, per Second Spectrum, 248 more than the next-closest team. The distance between them and the second-place Utah Jazz is greater than the distance between the Jazz and the 25th-place Boston Celtics. It helps that Sacramento has three high-level options with whom Sabonis can pair on those plays: Huerter leads the league in points off dribble hand-offs, while Monk is second and Fox is 24th. Those duos rank first (Sabonis-Huerter), third (Sabonis-Monk) and fifth (Sabonis-Fox) in points generated out of their hand-off plays.

Whether designed or freelanced, Sabonis has excellent feel for how to navigate these actions, and his partners are able to take advantage of the space he creates for them with the screens he sets while handing them the ball.

It’s a credit to new coach Mike Brown (the team’s 12th head man since its last playoff appearance) that things have flowed so seamlessly for the Kings on that end of the floor while they’ve incorporated multiple new pieces, including a rookie starter in Keegan Murray. (And that Brown has kept Harrison Barnes fully engaged despite a reduced role.) They can get away from Sabonis at times (his 19.9 percent usage rate is his lowest mark since his rookie season, when he often looked actively terrified of what Russell Westbrook would do if Sabonis took a shot), and both Fox and Monk can get a little bit trigger-happy looking for their shot. But everything seems to be geared around taking advantage of each player’s inherent strengths, and those strengths are complementary. That’s a recipe for a very good offense.

The Kings still need work in the point-prevention department, but it’s at least encouraging that they rank 17th in defensive efficiency. That’s certainly better than could have reasonably been expected coming into the season — Sacramento ranked 27th last year — and it’s notable that opponents have actually outperformed their expected shooting efficiency (based on shot location, defender location and other factors included in Second Spectrum’s algorithm) by the league’s fifth-largest margin to date, so there is room for improvement even if the Kings don’t qualitatively defend any better. Sacramento is unlikely to ever field a top-10 defense given its personnel, but if the Kings can remain around a league-average unit (or even slightly below), their suddenly dangerous offense is enough to have them in the mix for a play-in spot all year long.

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NBA

James Harden Doesn't Need To Play Fast To Play Efficiently

By Louis Zatzman

Dec. 13, 2022, at 11:14 AM

With his Philadelphia 76ers tied 109-109 with the Chicago Bulls on Oct. 29, James Harden caught the ball on the left wing with just over 20 seconds remaining. He had just crossed half court. He held the ball for a moment and waited for a screen from Joel Embiid. He jab stepped, took a slow step or two and tossed it right back to Embiid for an open triple and the ensuing win.

The Sixers scored more points on that possession than Harden took dribbles. He never came close to the interior of the 3-point arc and didn’t threaten the defense with his own scoring; however, he created a wide-open, game-winning three for his teammate. 

Harden’s approach in that moment was not out of the ordinary for him. He plays slow, measured basketball — and not just in crunch time, when many teams slow down. In his first game back from a foot injury on Dec. 5, a double-overtime loss to the Houston Rockets, Harden spent more than 80 percent of his time on the court going slowly, defined as moving less than 8 feet per second. Only 13 games so far this season have featured a player spending at least 80 percent of his time moving slowly,¹⁸ and three of them belong to Harden.¹⁹

Harden’s style exists in stark contrast to modern basketball, where playing uptempo is akin to gospel. Playing in transition, with open space and fewer defenders, is more efficient than playing in the crowded half court. The more time ticks away on the shot clock, the less lucrative a possession becomes, whether in transition or the half court. You get a bigger payoff from getting the ball inside than moving it anywhere else on the court. Playing quickly, shooting early and reaching the paint are the foundations of efficient offense. And yet, one of the most efficient players in basketball history doesn’t fit that mold.

Perhaps “conservation of motion” is a more apt way of describing Harden’s M.O. Per Second Spectrum, Harden spends the second-largest percentage of time leaguewide moving slowly on the court.²⁰ He’s also sixth in the league in average touch length,²¹ recording 5.684 seconds with the ball every time he catches it. In other words, he frequently holds that ball without doing anything obvious with it. But importantly for both Harden and the Sixers, this approach mostly works. 

Harden has maintained a high usage rate and efficiency despite rejecting the tenets of contemporary basketball: Per Second Spectrum, among the 82 players averaging at least 100 touches per 100 team possessions (with at least 100 total touches on the season), possessions in which Harden touches the ball are the 10th-most efficient, scoring 1.075 points per chance. That efficiency isn’t dependent on attacking the rim, either — a Harden touch is just as efficient on possessions with zero drives as on possessions with one or more. And we found little to no correlation between Harden’s fastest-movement or highest-load games as a Sixer (according to Second Spectrum’s fitness tracking) and his best games (as measured by Basketball Reference’s Box Score Plus/Minus). Nor was there a correlation between Harden’s fastest-movement or highest-load games and the Sixers’ win-loss record in those contests.

So Harden doesn’t need to play quickly or reach the paint to create advantages for his team. He’s currently attempting just 21 percent of his shots at the rim, good for the 22nd-percentile mark for his position and the lowest rate of his career. However, the Sixers do generate 1.075 points per chance on possessions in which Harden touches the ball, tying the second-highest mark of any team during Harden’s career since 2013-14, when SportsVU cameras began consistently tracking such data. And within that mark, the Sixers are more efficient when Harden touches the ball outside the arc than inside of it. 

How is this possible? Harden uses the threat of his jumper, combined with fearless tight-window passing, to create open lanes for teammates — rather than himself — with little movement required. He’s like a quarterback in the pocket, looking for receivers downfield. And if he needs to get them a little more open, he can always lull off-ball defenders to sleep with his dribble.

There are some downsides to this style. Harden’s immobility is much less of an advantage on the defensive end, where the Sixers are better with Harden on the bench than the court. And when Harden is playing off the ball on offense, he does little to create advantages. He ranks 158th in cutting frequency off screens. Neither does he set many screens, as Second Spectrum has recorded only 14 off-ball screens set by Harden this season. While fellow stars can terrorize defenses without the ball, Harden often prefers to stand still far behind the 3-point line. When he can draw defenders out there to guard him without the ball, it’s not a loss. But that can’t always be counted on.

Even when he does cut, Harden remains unhurried. Sometimes he’ll jog through a cut with no intention of creating an advantage with his movement, catch the ball and then wait out the entire shot clock before making a move. Even when those possessions end up successful, they look different than the conventional NBA attack.

Harden will even do the same in transition, catching the ball above the arc with the defense in disarray and then stopping dead for almost 10 seconds. He can wait for the entire play to develop around him, an orbital body in stasis around which the nine other players rush, before finding an opening and shooting.

It is possible that many players who shoulder significant portions of their teams’ responsibilities need to offer less physical effort on any given individual possession. Perhaps they know how and when to save energy, or perhaps they need to move a shorter distance or with less force to create advantages. That might explain why the players who rarely move fast²² tend to be stars.

For most players, holding the ball and dribbling for long periods of time does not lead to points. Across the league this season, a half-court touch with eight or more dribbles results in 0.972 points per chance, compared with the league average of 1.001 across all chances. But Harden averages 1.023 points per chance within such restrictions. He is fourth in the league²³ in his frequency of possessions that use at least a third of the shot clock while featuring zero passes, averaging more than 13 such touches per 100 possessions. He is scoring an outrageous 1.556 points per chance when simply holding the ball in that way (on an admittedly minuscule sample size).

Comparing Harden to past versions of himself reveals just how much his offensive approach has changed. He’s driven less often in only two seasons since 2013-14, and his blow-by percentage on drives has never been lower. However, he’s generating more points per chance on possessions featuring a drive than he typically has. Since at least 2013-14, he has never spent as low a percentage of his time going fast, and he’s never moved so slow. He’s isolating less, taking fewer layups and running more pick-and-rolls.

Harden is 33 years old, and in a certain sense, he’s following a normal aging curve — moving slower and bursting past defenders with less frequency. In the NBA, that process rarely allows players to remain stars, but it hasn’t seemed to limit Harden’s success. His production has simply come via different routes. Players who thrive into their 30s are usually lauded for their longevity. Harden is undergoing his own version of that evolution; as his body has changed, so too has his process for maximizing time on the court. And he’s remained dominant through it all. His newest trick is just to bend NBA defenses with the power of stillness.

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NBA

The Cavaliers Bet Big On Donovan Mitchell. Here’s Why It’s Working.

By Jared Dubin

Dec. 9, 2022, at 12:35 PM

Last season, the Cleveland Cavaliers were arguably the NBA’s most improved team. After going just 22-50 during the pandemic-shortened 2020-21 campaign, Cleveland improved its record all the way to 44-38, making the second-largest season-to-season jump in winning percentage behind the Minnesota Timberwolves. And on a per-possession basis, the Cavs lapped the field in improvement with a 10.8-point spike in their net rating — 2.7 points per 100 possessions better than that of any other squad.

A rash of injuries throughout that season (Collin Sexton, Ricky Rubio and Jarrett Allen chief among them) led to Cleveland faltering down the stretch and eventually failing to make it out of the play-in round. But after that small taste of success, the Cavaliers swung the biggest move of the NBA offseason, trading Sexton, rookie Ochai Agbaji, Lauri Markkanen and a bushel of first-round picks to the Utah Jazz in exchange for Donovan Mitchell. Adding Mitchell to a core that already included All-Stars in Allen and Darius Garland, plus the Rookie of the Year runner-up in Evan Mobley, gave Cleveland one of the league’s deepest wells of star talent.²⁴

Although that hasn’t fully manifested itself in FiveThirtyEight’s RAPTOR-based prediction model (we still call for Cleveland to fall just shy of 50 wins), the Cavs currently have the NBA’s fourth-best record (16-9), with the point differential of an 18-7 team, and they’re one of just four teams ranked inside the top 10 on both offense and defense.²⁵ Let’s dig into what’s driving that success, as well as some things that could tip the scales toward the Cavs leveling up even further.

The small backcourt hasn’t hurt on defense

The Cavaliers’ defense is, in fact, the best in basketball right now — a bit of a surprise, considering it was the defensive side of the floor where observers had the biggest question marks about how the trade for Mitchell would work out. Garland had been a negative defender through his first three NBA seasons, and Mitchell had taken dramatic steps backward on that end. Both of those players are listed at a mere 6-foot-1, typically putting Cleveland at a tremendous size disadvantage in the backcourt.

There have been only 11 teams since the 1999-2000 season to give at least 41 starts to a pair of players listed 6-foot-1 or shorter. Interestingly, that list includes both the 2019-20 and 2020-21 Cavaliers with Garland, as well as the 2019-20, 2020-21 and 2022-22 Jazz with Mitchell.

As I wrote when the Mitchell deal went down, teams with these pint-sized backcourts generally ranked around the defensive league average, but that average was skewed by a couple of very high-level performances across the league. (The 2020-21 Jazz had Rudy Gobert, an all-time interior defender, while the 2019-20 Raptors were running an extremely innovative defensive system and were stocked with elite, multi-positional defenders.) Without those two outliers, the typical defense with a tiny backcourt was below average. But what gave the Cavs outlier potential of their own was the massive nature of their frontcourt (and the defensive acumen of their two starting big men), which could offset the size disadvantage of their guards.

And that’s pretty much exactly how things have worked for this version of the Cavs. Mitchell vowed before the season that he would “lock in” more on defense, and he’s kept that promise to date; Garland showed some growth as a defender last season, and it has continued this year, but the defense is still anchored by the bigs.

Allen remains one of the NBA’s premier protectors of the basket: Among 29 players who have played in at least 10 games and challenged at least 5 shots per night, Allen ranks second in opponent field-goal percentage when within 5 feet of both the rim and the shooter, according to NBA.com. Mobley remains one of the league’s best switch-defenders in space: Among 137 players who have switched 35 or more ball screens, according to Second Spectrum, he ranks 11th in points per possession allowed (0.696) when the play is finished by the ball handler or a teammate one pass away.

Garland has pulled his weight on offense

It’s at least interesting that the Cavaliers’ offense is a bit behind their defense, especially considering that following the Mitchell trade it was widely speculated the team’s offense would be fine and the defense might take some time to come around. But scoring at the eighth-best rate in basketball is pretty damn good, to be clear. There are signs that the current state of Cleveland’s offense is propped up by unsustainable shooting, but reassuringly, there’s also some low-hanging fruit the Cavs can pluck to counteract any shooting regression.

For example, it’s highly encouraging that Cleveland’s offense in Garland-only minutes has been nearly as good as in Mitchell-only minutes. The duo shares the ball handling responsibility pretty equally when in the game together, but they each take on a much clearer lead-dog role when the other isn’t on the floor with them. That the Cavs have maintained their scoring efficiency with one or the other on the bench is a good sign.

Garland’s usage rate has actually gone up just a bit this season despite Mitchell’s presence, and he hasn’t experienced much of a drop-off in his true shooting percentage. Garland remains a long-range sniper, connecting on more than 38 percent of his threes for the third consecutive season. He’s also become an improved passer, as evidenced by both his career-low turnover rate and the fact that he’s on pace for about 47 fewer bad-pass giveaways per 82 games than he had a season ago. If he can get back to hitting his floaters around 50 percent of the time (like he did last season), Garland can be even better.

Mitchell is shooting the lights out

Speaking of shooting … We have to talk about Mitchell, who is posting career-best numbers in basically every shooting category. He’s connected on 55.4 percent of his two-point shots, 42.4 percent of his threes and 49.6 percent of his shots overall. These figures are far and away the best of his career. That’s also the case for his 77 percent conversion rate on shots within 3 feet of the basket and his 53.1 percent mark on shots 3 to 10 feet out.

Is it possible that playing alongside a talent of Garland’s caliber could account for some of this improvement? Of course, it is. However, it’s highly unlikely that Garland’s presence accounts for Mitchell’s otherworldly off-the-dribble shooting.

Through his first five seasons, Mitchell’s career-best effective field goal percentage on jump shots taken after two or more dribbles was 52.99 percent, according to Second Spectrum. This year, that figure has shot all the way up to 62.07 percent, despite the fact that those off-dribble jumpers have: a) been more closely contested than ever and b) yielded the second-worst expected conversion rate of his career.²⁶ Mitchell just happens to be outperforming expectations on those shots by the third-largest margin of any of the 692 players who have taken 150 or more them in a season during the player-tracking era, which now spans 10 seasons.

And there’s still room for improvement

Even if Mitchell’s outrageous off-dribble shooting reverts to form, there’s reason to believe that the Cavs can remain a top offense. The foundation of their attack is, like for most teams, the high pick and roll, and the Mitchell-Allen and Garland-Allen duos rank first (Mitchell 1.421) and 29th (Garland, 1.184) in points per possession among the 99 teammate pairings with 100 or more ball screens, per Second Spectrum.²⁷

More than anything else, though, the Cavs can boost their offense by speeding things up a bit. Despite being at a talent advantage almost every night, Cleveland plays at the slowest pace in the league. Overall, no NBA team is slower to get into its offense: According to Second Spectrum, it takes 7.27 seconds for the Cavs to initiate the first action (a cut, screen, drive, etc.) on their average trip up the floor. Cranking up the speed and getting into things a second or so faster could mean the difference between having to put up a contested shot near the end of the clock and being able to pump-fake and get a little bit more open. Cleveland’s expected effective field goal percentage ranks just 16th in the NBA; playing with more pace could nudge that number toward or even into the top 10.

It would also help because the Cavs almost never get out on the break, with just 13.7 percent of their non-garbage-time possessions coming in transition, according to Cleaning the Glass. That’s the league’s fourth-lowest rate. Transition possessions are, predictably, far more efficient than those run against a set defense in the halfcourt, so increasing the rate at which they run can also help get the offense where it needs to be for the Cavs to firmly keep themselves among the league’s elite.

They’ll also want to shore up the team’s wing depth at some point, especially if they can acquire a player to actually help on both sides of the ball. Caris LeVert is shooting just 37 percent from the field. Isaac Okoro undermines the team’s offensive structure whenever he’s on the floor because he is both reluctant to take and unable to reliably make shots, and his defense hasn’t been good enough to make up for it. Cedi Osman, Dean Wade and Lamar Stevens at least have the size to handle big-wing defensive assignments — but of the three, only Wade can consistently shoot, and only Osman can really put the ball on the deck. In a league dominated in large part by big-wing creators, the Cavs have a glaring hole in that department. 

Still, the Cavs bet that acquiring Mitchell would vault them into the realm of contention, and so far it appears that bet is working out quite nicely. Even if the Cavs are not necessarily on the level of the Celtics or Bucks, they are much closer than they were a year ago — and they have laid a foundation for sustainable contention over the next few years, with a core group of players that should only get better. The price they paid was high, but so is the potential pay-off.

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Fifty Years After Their Last NBA Title, The Knicks Are Still Adrift

By Daniel Levitt

Dec. 7, 2022, at 10:46 AM

When it comes to putting together a championship-caliber team, there are a few tried-and-true methods. Teams can build their nucleus through the draft like the Golden State Warriors did with Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson and Draymond Green. They can make a franchise-altering trade like the blockbuster deal the Toronto Raptors pulled off to acquire Kawhi Leonard. They can mimic the San Antonio Spurs’ dynasty under head coach Gregg Popovich and front office executive R.C. Buford and become a beacon of stability and continuity. Or a team can catapult itself into contention through free agency, similar to how the Miami Heat orchestrated a championship roster when they persuaded LeBron James and Chris Bosh to join Dwyane Wade.

Or maybe they should just look at whatever the New York Knicks are doing, and do the exact opposite. As they stand currently at 11-13, tied for the ninth seed in the Eastern Conference, the Knicks enter the 50th season since their last NBA title as a model of how not to run an NBA franchise. This is despite a number of structural advantages that would seem to stack the deck in New York’s favor — including a massive media market, an immensely valuable franchise and plenty of star power passing through the locker room at Madison Square Garden:

New York last won a championship in 1972-73, having won another three seasons earlier. Those iconic teams were led by the likes of Willis Reed, Bill Bradley and Walt Frazier — drafted by the Knicks in 1964, 1965 and 1967, respectively — plus Dave DeBusschere and Earl Monroe — brought to New York in trades with the Detroit Pistons and Baltimore Bullets, respectively — and were coached by Red Holzman, who took over during 1967-68 season and remained on the sideline for another nine years until he departed (for the first time)²⁸ in 1977. Had free agency existed back then, the Knicks were positioned well to attract the league’s best players.

As the core of their roster aged past its prime, the next decade saw the Knicks mostly rebuild. But once again, they restocked the cupboard in a multitude of ways. They selected Hall of Famer Patrick Ewing No. 1 overall in the 1985 NBA draft, traded for stalwarts Charles Oakley and Latrell Sprewell and signed John Starks and Allan Houston through free agency. Hall of Fame coach Pat Riley called the X’s and O’s for four seasons and, after a brief (and surprisingly unsuccessful) 59-game tenure under Don Nelson, Jeff Van Gundy assumed the helm for parts of seven seasons. While the ‘90s Knicks weren’t able to lift the Larry O’Brien Trophy for a third time, they did make it to the NBA Finals in 1994 and 1999, and were revered and feared by their peers throughout the association.

But the following season, the Knicks entered a new chapter under owner James Dolan, one that completely changed the franchise’s trajectory — and not for the better. Dolan has been heavily mocked and criticized during his tenure as Knicks owner, both for his on- and off-the-court decisions and antics. Whether that’s been fair or at times over the top, his management and leadership can certainly be viewed as a turning point for the team.

In the 26 seasons between 1973 and 1999, the team had a .522 winning percentage (a 1,096-1,004 record). In the 24 seasons since Dolan took charge, New York has a .419 winning percentage (782-1,086), and is a total of 304 games under .500, which is the worst in the NBA.

During that time, the Knicks have just six winning seasons and only seven playoff appearances. They did make the Eastern Conference finals in Dolan’s first season, but that was largely a carryover from the core built by the franchise’s previous stewards. As a sign of just how irrelevant the Knicks have become, only the Charlotte Hornets have fewer playoff appearances since the 1999-00 season.

And the ugly win-loss totals only scratch the surface of the team’s failures. Some of the front office’s decisions over the past 24 years have been dreadful, even worse with a little 20/20 hindsight. Ultimately, they highlight just how hopeless the team has been at trying to revive its successes of the ‘70s (or even the ‘90s).

The list of names the Knicks have brought in via trade or free agency have hardly been anything to write home about (shh, don’t tell Derrick Rose, Amar’e Stoudamire or Eddy Curry). That’s of course until you get to the trade that, depending on whom you ask, either resulted in the team’s greatest success in the Dolan era, or set the team back from its championship ambitions another decade-plus.

In February 2011, after months of speculation, New York finally pulled the trigger and acquired Carmelo Anthony from the Denver Nuggets. The addition came as part of a three-team deal that saw nearly two dozen players and picks change hands; with it, the MSG faithful finally landed a legit superstar. Anthony had led the Nuggets to the Western Conference finals two seasons prior and was entering his prime at 26 years old — and plus was a New York native who dreamed of playing for the Knicks: Anthony was born in Brooklyn and led the Syracuse Orange to the 2003 men’s NCAA national championship.

The problem was the man on the other end of the phone: Nuggets General Manager Masai Ujiri. Ujiri was on the rise as one of the NBA’s savviest executives — Ujiri would later mastermind the Raptors’ championship run in 2019 — and, sensing the pressure the Knicks’ front office was under to deliver its fan base a hometown hero, the deal was described as an significant overpay considering New York could have acquired Anthony for nothing just months later in free agency. Instead, New York’s war chest of assets was left relatively empty, and the resulting roster was not enough to overcome Paul George and the Indana Pacers in the 2013 Eastern Conference semifinals (let alone Miami’s LeBron-Wade-Bosh juggernaut).

The Carmelo romance ended acrimoniously when team president Phil Jackson, one of Dolan’s worst and most bizarre appointments, signed Anthony in 2014 to a five-year, $124 million extension (including a no-trade clause), then repeatedly bashed the star in public before he got himself fired in June 2017, and paved the way for Anthony’s exit in a trade to the Oklahoma City Thunder later that year. Years on, the pair are still at each other’s throats, and the whole ordeal will perhaps be remembered as the Knicks’ most defining moment of the past two decades. 

The Knicks’ draft record has been just as suspect under Dolan. One part they can’t control: New York has some of the worst luck of any team in the lottery since it was instituted in 1985, in terms of the bouncing balls costing the team chances to pick higher. (Ironic, given that one of the earliest tanking conspiracies involved Ewing, the Knicks and a bent and/or frozen envelope at the draft lottery.) But as part of their fixation with star veterans, the Knicks have also consistently traded away picks and gotten less favorable draft positioning than we’d expect from their record. For example, since 2000, we’d expect New York to have the second-most valuable set of picks out of any team based on their total expected production; instead, through a combination of trades and lottery bounces, New York’s actual picks have only been 22nd-most valuable.

Not that the Knicks would have used their original picks well even if they’d had them. Since the 2000 draft, New York has selected 41 total players, only nine of which made either an All-Rookie first or second team.²⁹ Perhaps it’s unfair to pick on the team too much, because after all drafting future stars at such a young age is incredibly difficult and every team has whiffed at some point. 

But developing that young talent has again been a problem, with only David Lee and Kristaps Porziņģis going on to represent the organization at the All-Star Game among homegrown talent. 

And some of the names taken immediately after past selections will make New York fans wince. During the Dolan era, the Knicks passed on Amar'e Stoudemire, Rajon Rondo, DeMar DeRozan, Tobias Harris and Mikal Bridges (or Shai Gilgeous-Alexander) in the first round to take Nenê Hilario, Renaldo Balkman, Jordan Hill, Iman Shumpert and Kevin Knox, respectively, either one or two picks earlier.

Is there any indication that the Knicks’ next 50 years might be any better? In the short term, the organization appears to finally be finding a measure of stability under president Leon Rose, GM Scott Perry and head coach Tom Thibodeau. While the team still hovers around the middle of the NBA pack, its perfectly .500 record over the past three seasons is a major improvement over the ghastly half-decade that came before. With one of the league’s youngest rosters, New York is getting its production out of a promising core of players mostly in their mid-20s (including headline offseason pickup Jalen Brunson). Unlike many of the Dolan-era editions of this team, there is hope that things can find an upswing as the season goes on.

And maybe the most promising prospect of all for Knicks fans were this summer’s reports that Dolan was potentially courting offers to sell the team. While Dolan later denied the rumor, new ownership might be the only path for New York to avoid another half-century of futility. Considering everything they have going for them, the Knicks should have been better over the past 50 years — and while Dolan hasn’t been steering the ship the entire time, his reign atop the franchise has left it adrift, far from its last encounters with championship glory.

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Kyrie Irving's Stats Aren't Worth The Drama

By Santul Nerkar

Nov. 17, 2022, at 11:54 AM

Throughout Kyrie Irving’s many basketball hiatuses over the years — whether due to injuries, refusal to take the COVID-19 vaccine or, most recently, suspension for promoting an anti-Semitic documentary — the mercurial star’s on-court brilliance has rarely been questioned. Contemporaries have often called him the most skilled player in the history of the NBA, with some going as far to say he ranks among the league’s 75 best players ever. And watching Irving certainly leaves you dazzled: You’d be hard-pressed to find a more maddening cover on defense, equipped with an arsenal of how-did-he-think-of-that moves and the slipperiness to evade even the rangiest and most committed of stoppers. 

But Irving’s status as the darling of basketball aesthetes everywhere has obscured his overall contributions to winning basketball — even in the rare cases when he’s on the floor. On a per-possession basis, Irving has cracked the top 25 of FiveThirtyEight’s regular-season Total RAPTOR metric just once since arriving in Brooklyn for the 2019-20 season, and in his career he’s reached that benchmark fewer times (four) than he’s fallen outside of it (five). For a player whose observable skill set has long confounded the advanced metrics, it’s fitting that RAPTOR sees Irving’s impact differently than the conventional wisdom does:

The most obvious culprit for Irving’s less-impressive-than-expected numbers here is his defense. Listed at 6-foot-2, 195 pounds, Irving has always been an easy target for opposing offenses to hunt, and he’s been a net-negative on that end for all but one year of his career during the player-tracking era. Though his defensive impact has trended upward with each successive season in Brooklyn, his numbers remain woefully below-average for a player of his caliber and position: Last season, Irving’s negative-0.9 defensive RAPTOR ranked 41st out of 72 point guards who played at least 1,000 regular-season minutes, and he’s been an above-average defender at his position in just one season of his 12-year career. 

It’s a credit to Irving’s improvement on that end that he no longer ranks among the very worst defenders in the league — his 2016-17 defensive performance ranks 13th-worst among the 652 qualifying guard-seasons since 2013-14 — but he still lags behind his peers in that regard. Compare that to the oft-maligned defense of Warriors guard Stephen Curry, whom RAPTOR has seen as a net-positive defender in all but three years since 2013-14.

But while Irving’s defense has usually left something to be desired, it’s hardly the sole reason for this apparent disconnect between his reputation and observable impact on the game of basketball. (After all, nobody has ever accused Kyrie of being a lockdown defender.) Even on offense, as you’ll notice from the table above, Irving has never consistently ascended to the league’s upper echelon during his professional career.

While he’s finished among the top five a couple of times (2014-15 and 2018-19), Irving’s best season by offensive RAPTOR — 2016-17, in which he recorded a plus-6.3 and sniffed a spot in the coveted 50-40-90 club — ranks as just the 29th-best per-possession offensive performance by a point guard since 2013-14 and the 37th-best overall, while his 2020-21 campaign (which saw him actually record that 50-40-90) ranks 38th and 54th, respectively. Curry (seven times), Chris Paul (five), James Harden (five), Damian Lillard (four), Russell Westbrook (twice), Trae Young (twice), Kyle Lowry (once) and even Isaiah Thomas (once) all posted more impactful offensive seasons than Irving during this time period.

So why doesn’t Irving’s offensive effectiveness line up with what our eyes tell us? A big reason may lie in the divergence between Irving’s traditional numbers and his on-court impact. Take Player Efficiency Rating, for example, a per-minute metric that measures a player’s box score production, as opposed to on-off plus/minus, which measures how a player’s team does when he’s in the game versus not. Irving tends to perform better in PER than in on-off statistics, as shown in the chart below:

As a corollary, Irving’s assist rate isn't in the same ballpark of distributors like Harden and Paul, nor does he move off the ball like Curry. The very attributes that have drawn Kyrie comparisons to dribbling maestros like Rod Strickland³⁰ and Allen Iverson may also be the ones that keep him from entering the realm of all-time offensive greats. As my colleague Jared Dubin wrote last spring, Irving’s ball-stopping tendencies on offense came to a head against the Boston Celtics during the 2022 playoffs, where his approach of seeking out contested shots against the rangy Boston defense helped stymie any rhythm Brooklyn was hoping to build.

Yes, Brooklyn’s offensive rating of 115.0 with Irving on the floor would have ranked No. 3 as a seasonlong metric in 2021-22, but therein lies the Kyrie conundrum. As a negative defender, you have to hope for an otherworldly offensive explosion from Irving and company to offset the likely defensive drop-off that comes with his presence — and even a rate of 115.0 was not good enough. As it stands, Irving is not the scorer or distributor who can supercharge a team past its glaring defensive deficiencies — and a Brooklyn roster construction that is, shall we say, not exactly defensively inclined. And this year, it’s probably not a coincidence that the Nets are defending much better while Irving has been off the floor. (Even counting the 153-point avalanche the Nets surrendered to the Sacramento Kings Tuesday night, with Irving still suspended.)

Finally, Irving’s numbers have tended to tail off when it counts the most — in the playoffs. Since leaving the Cleveland Cavaliers (where he admittedly drained one of the most famous buckets in NBA history), Irving has managed 21.9 points per game on 43/35/93 shooting splits in 22 postseason contests, a significant decline from both his playoff stats as a Cav and from his regular-season numbers as a Net. At the same time, his team has been outscored with him on the floor in two of his past three postseasons. 

And again, these numbers only show Irving when he’s been on the floor, an all-too-unfamiliar sight dating back to his time at Duke (when a busted-up toe was the only source of missed games). Out of the eight postseasons his teams have played in during his career, Irving has missed substantial parts of four, in addition to playing fewer than 50 percent of regular-season games since 2019-20. If you look at Irving’s RAPTOR wins above replacement, a cumulative statistic, it becomes clear that his (un)availability is his greatest (in)ability: In that category, Irving has ranked among the top 20 most valuable NBA players in a given season just twice since 2013-14. 

None of this is to say that Irving isn’t preternaturally gifted — nor is it to suggest that he doesn’t belong in discussions of the all-time NBA greats. (That 3-pointer he hit to defeat the 73-9 Golden State Warriors is the ultimate trump card in that respect.) Rather, it’s a remark on how arguably the most aesthetically pleasing, mesmerizing and skilled player in the history of arguably the most skill-driven sport has left meat on the bone. (Sound familiar?) 

Of course, a powerful first step to correcting that discrepancy would be to show up on the basketball court, and Irving will soon have that opportunity again, as he nears a return from suspension on Sunday against the Memphis Grizzlies. But we’ll see how long it lasts: Time and time again, even being available to play has often proved unattainable for basketball’s most frustrating star.  

Neil Paine contributed research.

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Does Trading For An NBA Star Work? It's Complicated.

By Louis Zatzman

Nov. 11, 2022, at 2:51 PM

This past NBA offseason was defined by high-profile trades — including both those that did happen, and those that didn’t. Following a fire sale by the Utah Jazz,³¹ Rudy Gobert is now a member of the Minnesota Timberwolves, while Donovan Mitchell is a Cleveland Cavalier. Meanwhile, if Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving were available in trade talks for much of the summer, that bit of Brooklyn Nets drama has been replaced several times over.

Building an NBA team is, at its core, about collecting as much talent as possible. So in a rudimentary sense, trading for stars — the players with the most impact — ought to be a no-brainer. But it doesn’t always work out that way.

To study this, we relied on FiveThirtyEight’s RAPTOR player ratings to tell us which players qualify as stars. Specifically, we set the bar at a plus/minus mark of plus-5.0 points per 100 possessions or higher for an individual regular season, which narrows the list of star players to a small and consistent group each season. From 2013-14 — the start of the NBA’s player-tracking era — to 2021-22, an average of 14 players per season reached that threshold while playing at least 1,000 minutes. 

While NBA players have recorded 126 total “star seasons” since 2013-14, only 11 coming off of a star season have been traded before the following season’s trade deadline.³² Trades for stars are rare — possibly in part because they don’t always work as intended for either team.

The majority of the departing stars spent long periods of time with their teams before being dealt. Only three players — Paul George in Oklahoma City, Jimmy Butler in Minnesota and Goran Dragić in Phoenix — were on a team for two or fewer seasons before being traded, while the remainder played at least six seasons before their deals. In other words, most of these stars tried (and failed) to win championships for many years with their teams; a trade was simply the last stop at the end of that well-worn road. 

Most star trades failed to result in championships for the acquiring team, too. During our period of research (looking at the three years following a trade), only two stars — Kevin Love and Anthony Davis — helped their new teams win the NBA title.³³ And after three years, every team but one was reaching the same round of the playoffs — at best — as they got to before the trade. A little friendly advice for all general managers eyeing the next star to hit the trade block: Your window of contention after trading for an established star may be narrow.

Historically, the one way to trade for a star and win a championship seems to be to also sign LeBron James. (Easy enough, right?) That happened for the Cleveland Cavaliers within two seasons of trading for Love in 2014 and again for the Los Angeles Lakers immediately after trading for Davis in 2019.

Otherwise, though, many teams that traded for stars saw their fortunes barely budge. For example, the Detroit Pistons were a 37-win team the season before trading for Blake Griffin and improved by just two wins the next season. They saw another two-win uptick in 2018-19 and reached the first round of the playoffs, but they were swept and haven’t reached the postseason since. Other squads (such as the Nets with James Harden, the Philadelphia 76ers with Butler, the Jazz with Mike Conley and the Miami Heat with Dragić) have seen their net ratings and/or playoff fortunes plateau after acquiring their new star.³⁴ There is obvious upside to adding some of the league’s best talent, but there also seems to be risk.

(There have also been examples of championship-boosting trades for excellent players who weren’t quite stars by our accounting. For instance, the Toronto Raptors added Kawhi Leonard the offseason before winning it all in 2019, and the Milwaukee Bucks traded for Jrue Holiday the offseason before winning a championship in 2021. Neither qualified as a star the immediate season before the deal, but Leonard had played at a plus-8.3 RAPTOR level two seasons prior, and Holiday missed star status by a few decimal points.) 

Outside of the championship-winning teams, the teams who went furthest in the playoffs after trading for stars were the Houston Rockets (after adding Chris Paul) and the Los Angeles Clippers (after adding George). But those teams also rostered Harden and Leonard, respectively. Having just one star doesn’t seem to be enough to ensure success; star trades work best with another star already on the roster. 

Minnesota boasts a core of Karl-Anthony Towns, Anthony Edwards and D’Angelo Russell, so the team that Gobert joined is hardly devoid of talent. But none of their returning players managed to break the plus-5.0 RAPTOR threshold last season, with Towns coming closest at plus-2.0. And even next to that established foundation, Gobert may well be the T-Wolves’ most impactful player. Although it hasn’t shown up in the on/off-court metrics yet, he theoretically fits the current construction of the roster, despite his co-star being another center. But the teams who improved most in the playoffs following a star acquisition had players already on the roster with higher RAPTOR ratings than the newcomer. Indeed, the Timberwolves are 5-7 against a relatively weak schedule early in the season, and though they have time to improve, they don’t currently have the profile of a championship contender.

The Cavaliers, on the other hand, have a better base to build from, with two near-stars in Darius Garland and Jarrett Allen. Last season, Garland and Allen recorded RAPTOR ratings of plus-4.5 and plus-4.3, respectively, and each earned first-time All-Star berths. If you believe in historical precedent, Cleveland seems more poised to benefit from the addition of Mitchell. And as if to emphasize that point, the Cavaliers have the league’s second-best net rating so far this season.

But until teams like the Cavs prove otherwise, the general rule is that star trades tend to produce mixed results for the team acquiring the big-name player. So does that mean, then, that the team trading away the star fares better?

Not really. In fact, no team that dealt away a star since at least 2013-14 has won a championship. And all but one — the Pelicans after trading away Davis — saw a drop in their net rating of at least 1 point and/or missed the playoffs the season after their deals. Admittedly, that outcome is more expected; teams often trade away their best players to get worse in the short term and improve their fortunes down the road. But as we can see from the clubs in our sample, that latter component doesn’t always happen, either.

Three seasons after trading away their stars, five of the nine teams for whom we have data missed the playoffs. Others on the list did improve within a few seasons — but even in those cases, it’s questionable as to whether that was caused by the trades themselves. 

The Clippers used the exits of Paul and Griffin to retool rather than bottom out, missing the playoffs only the first year following the deals.³⁵ They have since dealt their way to the top, trading Griffin for, among other things, a draft pick that they then traded for Shai Gilgeous-Alexander on draft night. They later traded Gilgeous-Alexander for George. However, none of the players traded to the Clippers (or selected by them) in exchange for Paul remain on the roster. 

The Memphis Grizzlies received a number of players and picks in exchange for Conley, but only Brandon Clarke remains in the rotation out of the bunch.³⁶ More than anything, the losses after bidding adieu to Conley resulted in more ping-pong balls in the 2019 draft, which helped land superstar Ja Morant in Memphis.

And the Phoenix Suns endured so many years of regression after dealing Dragić that they didn’t match their 2013-14 win total again until 2020-21, six years after the deal. None of the players traded to the Suns or selected by them in exchange for Dragić remain on the roster. 

Yes, at 10-3 after trading away Gobert and Mitchell, the Jazz are one of the surprises of the 2022-23 season, and the FiveThirtyEight forecast gives Utah an 87 percent chance of instantly reloading with another playoff trip. Perhaps they’ll buck the trend of middling post-trade results for teams that shipped off their top talent. But history is not on Utah’s side.

All told, trades for stars are risky from both perspectives. Selling teams generally haven’t improved past where they were with the star. Acquiring teams haven’t always leveraged their new marquee talent to further their playoff success. (And even when they did, it was often for a short period of time before a decline.) If any factor adequately predicted success for teams trading for stars, it’s the existing talent on those teams. But that requires getting a star to begin with … which is sort of the whole point of the endeavor. (And if you’re thinking about just holding onto your stars past the natural departure point, like the Nets did? That’s a whole other circle of Basketball Hell unto itself.) 

Ultimately, to make the market work in its favor, a team needs things to fall into place perfectly from the standpoint of talent, timing, fit and luck. For every Utah and Cleveland — who appear to be making it work, for now — there are countless others whose failures serve as a warning about the dangers of trading for a star.

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Refusing A Bench Role Ended Allen Iverson’s Career. Can Accepting One Save Russell Westbrook’s?

By Jared Dubin

Nov. 9, 2022, at 11:34 AM

Predictably, the Los Angeles Lakers are off to a disastrous start to the season. After getting demolished by the apparently-not-tanking Utah Jazz on Monday night, the Lakers are just 2-8. They have the NBA’s 15th-ranked defense (which actually isn’t too terrible), but are undermining it with the worst offense in basketball — and as a result, they sport the league’s second-worst point differential per 100 possessions. 

Fairly or not, the avatar of these struggles for many has been mercurial, highly paid guard Russell Westbrook. The Lakers were transparently desperate to move on from Russ this past summer, but ended up being unwilling to pull the trigger on a deal. Instead, a player the team clearly did not plan on having around is not only still on the roster, but has been heavily involved from the jump — leading to a cycle of poor play, clashes with the coaching staff and, ultimately, a banishment to the bench. For longtime NBA watchers, the entire saga reeked of … well, something extremely familiar.

Stop me if you’ve heard this story: A 34-year-old former perennial NBA All-Star, scoring champion and league MVP who was widely known for his individual offensive exploits and indefatigable competitiveness is on the downside of his career, bouncing from the franchise that drafted him to play for his fourth team in just a few seasons. It’s been quite a while since he was at the top of his game; his porous defense has been a problem for years, and his ability to get wherever he wants on the floor and create any shot at any time no longer makes up for it because he can’t make those shots with the same degree of consistency. (But he damn sure is willing to take those shots anyway.)

That sure sounds like the Westbrook story, right? It should, because it is. But it’s also the story of Allen Iverson, who in his age-34 season went through something a lot like what Westbrook is going through right now. While Westbrook still has time to avoid The Answer’s ultimate fate — and he may have already begun that process (emphasis on may have) — the final chapter of Iverson’s Hall of Fame career wasn’t a happy one, making him a cautionary tale for future players following the same path.

Before the steep, late-career decline, Iverson had been an outright superstar with the Philadelphia 76ers for a decade. He was the face of the franchise and one of the best players in league history. When he hit his early 30s and it was clear that things had run their course in Philly, Iverson demanded a trade and the Sixers eventually sent him to Denver, where he teamed with a fellow All-Star in Carmelo Anthony. A couple of years later, the Detroit Pistons traded for Iverson’s expiring contract in an effort to reboot the team after their sixth consecutive conference finals appearance ended in a third consecutive loss at the doorstep of the NBA Finals. The Pistons declined to re-sign Iverson that offseason, so instead he caught on with the Memphis Grizzlies. Memphis asked Iverson to come off the bench, and he was — to put it lightly — extremely unhappy with that request.

Things quickly spiraled out of control and Iverson was waived just over two months after signing with the team. He re-signed with Philadelphia a few weeks later and played out the rest of the season with the franchise that had made him the No. 1 overall pick 14 years earlier, but his career was effectively over by then. The precipitous decline in his skills, coupled with his outright refusal to adjust even a little bit the way he played the game, had made his place on an NBA roster untenable.

Beat-by-beat, that’s essentially just how things have gone for Westbrook. He was an outright superstar with the Oklahoma City Thunder for more than a decade. He was a face of the franchise and one of the best players in league history. When he hit his early 30s and it was clear that things had run their course in OKC, Westbrook opened himself to the possibility of a trade and the Thunder eventually sent him to Houston, where he teamed with a fellow All-Star (and former teammate) in James Harden. Things swiftly went awry with the Rockets, who sent him to the Washington Wizards in what amounted to a salary dump. For some reason, the Lakers decided they wanted in on the Westbrook experience, and acquired him the following summer. The deal was quickly and obviously a calamity, and the Lakers themselves were a train wreck.

Even the two players’ individual performances were remarkably similar, both overall and in terms of their respective career paths. It’s no wonder that when you head to Westbrook’s Basketball-Reference.com page and check out the career similarity scores section, this is what you’ll find:

Plot their season-by-season RAPTOR ratings against each other and you can see why that might be the case. Both players’ effectiveness took a steep nosedive as they entered their second decades in the NBA:

Things may have reached their Iversonian breaking point for Westbrook during a sequence late in L.A.’s Oct. 23 game against the Portland Trail Blazers. With about 30 seconds left and the Lakers leading the Blazers by a point, Westbrook cruised up the floor and, astonishingly, let loose with a hasty pull-up midrange jumper to the horror of the Laker crowd, the play-by-play crew, teammate LeBron James and just about everyone else on earth. (The Lakers would go on to lose the game, naturally.)

It was a play that encapsulated everything that has gone so terribly wrong with the Westbrook experience in Los Angeles. First of all, it was a bricked jumper. Second, it showcased his mind-boggling aversion to reining in his aggressiveness even the slightest bit. And third, it highlighted just how many people had absolutely had their fill of the Westbrook experience itself.

Russ was held out of the Lakers’ next game with what the team said was a recurrence of a sore hamstring — an injury Westbrook had previously blamed on the fact that new Lakers coach Darvin Ham had him come off the bench for a preseason game rather than start. Flashbacks to Iverson’s Grizzlies era could hardly have been more intense: Starting Westbrook was becoming impossible considering his poor fit alongside the LeBron-led lineup, and he was balking at coming off the bench. Given the tenor around the team at that moment, it wouldn’t have been surprising if we just never saw him play in Forum blue and gold again.

But rather than continuing to throw a fit the way Iverson did, Russ has actually come around and acquiesced to his new reserve role. And a funny thing has happened since he did. He actually started playing better! 

In six games coming off the bench, Westbrook has averaged 19.3 points, 5.3 rebounds and 6.8 assists per game, while shooting 51 percent from the field, 48 percent from three and 79 percent from the line. Before the loss to the Jazz on Monday (which James sat out with foot soreness), the Lakers had actually outscored their opponents by 13 points across Westbrook’s 150-plus minutes played during that stretch. (And the Lakers of recent vintage don’t usually outscore anybody.)

In addition to spending more of his floor time playing in lineups that better suit his strengths and weaknesses, playing with the reserves has allowed Westbrook to spend a smaller share of his minutes playing against opposing starters. For the significant majority of his career, Westbrook played somewhere between 35 and 50 percent of his minutes with all five opposing starters on the floor, according to PBPStats.com. This season, that number has plummeted south of 25 percent. And for only the third time ever, he’s played more than 30 percent of his minutes with two or fewer opposing starters in the game.³⁷ At this stage of his career, playing against a reduced level of competition can only help.

The shift hasn’t helped the Lakers all that much in the win column. They’re 2-4 with Westbrook playing with the second unit, and they’ve gotten blasted by a combined 51 points across their most recent three games. Simply sending Westbrook to the bench seems extremely unlikely to be the key move that turns their season around. In fact, the best chance of that happening might still come through a Westbrook trade.

But if the move hasn’t saved L.A.’s season, it might actually extend Westbrook’s career, which would help him avoid the way things ended for Iverson. His apparent willingness to take on a slightly different, slightly reduced role is the first-ever glimmer of hope that he recognizes where he is at this stage of his career. He still hasn’t changed the way he plays all that much, of course. (Baby steps, folks.) But if Ham can persuade him to come off the bench, perhaps there’s a coach out there, somewhere in the multiverse, who can get him to also set the occasional screen or up his intensity and focus on defense.

And in fact, it’s not unheard of for stars of Westbrook’s caliber to have second acts in their careers as role players. Dwight Howard was a backup center for years. Grant Hill and Vince Carter spent quite a while toward the end of their careers as complementary pieces. Somewhere inside Westbrook, there is still a player with useful NBA tools. Accepting what those tools are, and being willing to access them while putting others back in the shed, is the key to his staying in the NBA beyond this season — and getting off the career track that proved to be Iverson’s downfall.

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NBA

Dejounte Murray Looks Like The Running Mate Trae Young Needed

By James L. Jackson

Nov. 4, 2022, at 10:00 AM

Atlanta Hawks guard Trae Young has blossomed into one of the NBA’s best playmakers since his pro debut in 2018. Last season, the two-time All-Star further elevated his game by joining Nate “Tiny” Archibald as the only players to lead the NBA in total points and assists over a single season.

But it’s clear that Young also needs help. As if this fact needed proving, Young and his teammates ran out of gas during their first-round playoff series against the top-seeded Miami Heat last spring, during which Young attempted 21 more contested shots than any other Hawk.

That’s where the offseason acquisition of All-Star guard Dejounte Murray comes in. 

Atlanta is hoping Murray’s presence can help ease life for its franchise centerpiece this season, as well as fill in some of the missing elements of Young’s game. As the Hawks have started the season 5-3, Murray’s early returns — which include a career-high 36-point game against the New York Knicks Wednesday night — are showing many signs of promise.

Young has certainly proved he can take on a huge volume of plays with the ball in his hands. Over the past two seasons, he trails only Nikola Jokić and Luka Dončić in total touches, per Second Spectrum. And that’s generally been a good thing for Atlanta’s offense. Despite using 25 different starting lineups last season — the team’s most since 2012-13 — Young was a constant: His presence on the court swung the team’s offensive efficiency by double digits during the regular season, from a figure that would have led the league (117.2 points per 100 possessions) with Young in the game to a number that would be bottom-5 leaguewide (107.2) when he sat on the bench.

The playoffs, however, proved it is possible to have too much of a good thing. Against Miami, the Hawks’ offensive game plan seemed to simply be asking Young to produce everything himself — his rates of ballhandling and shot creation far outpaced those of his closest teammates:

Atlanta’s offense suffered as a result, with a paltry 104.1 points per 100 possessions in the playoffs overall, and 100.0 with Young on the court specifically. It’s not hard to see why, since Young’s individual numbers — 15.4 points and 6.0 assists per game, a 37.0 effective field-goal percentage  — were well below his usual norms as well.

Something needed to change. With Murray now in the rotation, Hawks head coach Nate McMillan can become more creative on offense with his All-NBA guard, rethinking how Young’s game might fit in among the rest of the team’s roster. 

For one thing, Murray shares some overlapping skills with Young. In the previous two seasons, Murray ranked 14th in total touches while Young ranked third. And last season, Young led all ballhandlers with 3,732 picks used while Murray finished sixth on the same list (with a career-high 2,617). Having both playmakers run the same offense should theoretically free up starting bigs Clint Capela and John Collins for cleaner looks near the rim. (And Atlanta was already trailing only the Golden State Warriors in uncontested makes from the restricted area in the previous two seasons.)

But the true mark of Murray’s impact will be his production when Young doesn’t have the ball — or isn’t even on the court. And on the flip side of things, we already can see that Young has been modifying his game when he plays next to Murray:

“Yeah, I mean, I also led the league in points last year, too” Young quipped after being asked about adjusting to shared playmaking duties. “I can score the ball, too. I know how to score the ball, so it’s gonna be times where I can focus strictly on scoring, and that’s fun. I’ve had to do both for a long time — trying to get everybody involved as well as score, too.

“I mean, it’s gonna be pick your poison, so I’m looking forward to it.”

As anyone who has watched the Hawks can tell you, Young tends to do some of his best work far away from the basket. Since his pro debut four years ago, he ranks eighth among all players in total 3-pointers made (730). But one area he has seldom explored is getting shots without the ball in his hands — he ranks only 243rd in catch-and-shoot makes (87) over the same span. Transitioning away from such a ball-dominant approach in shot creation could open up a key area of improvement for Atlanta’s offense.

And despite finishing second in offensive efficiency last season, with its best offense in nearly 15 years, Atlanta ranked 20th in points scored from the paint and outright last in fast-break scoring, per NBA.com. Any success the Hawks had near the rim in 2021-22 came by way of Young’s knack for creating points for himself and others – he led the league in lob assists for the second straight season.

By adding Murray — who ranked eighth among all players in kickout 3-pointers assisted on (95) in 2021-22, and whose 303 assist opportunities created in the restricted area ranked 12th among all players — the Hawks are hoping to bolster both areas of their offense, maintaining an effective attack while getting creative with Young’s involvement. 

Fully integrating Murray is still a work in progress. Murray sports a usage rate just north of 25 percent through his first eight games with Atlanta, which still trails Young (34.7 percent) considerably for the team lead. So how can Atlanta create a finer balance while keeping the elements that worked well in the past? 

Murray’s ability to create offense for his new teammates could grant the Hawks more room to weaponize the attention Young warrants from opponents. During his preseason debut with Atlanta, Murray whipped a pass to Collins after the latter provided a slip screen prior to rolling to the rim. Having Young hang out in the corner with viable roll threats should — in theory — give opposing defenses fits if other Hawks can credibly space the floor.

And the biggest variable in spacing the floor, of course, is actually hitting shots from deep. 

Here, Murray and Young team up on a long-range connection during a recent game against the Toronto Raptors. Murray, who leads the Hawks with 45.0 passes per game this season, drives off a screen and draws multiple defenders before whipping the ball across the court. Meanwhile, the Raptors lose track of Young on the weak side, and he drifts into the corner for an open look — something that had been a rarity for Young in his first four seasons. (He had made only 48 corner threes in his career before this season.)

Atlanta will need its upgraded backcourt to continue refining approaches to creating for one another and their fellow Hawks. Young’s scoring average thus far remains quite high (27.5 PPG),³⁸ but his overall efficiency (a career- and team-worst 44.1 effective field goal percentage) has not yet rounded into form. Fortunately, though, Murray has done his part in making life easier for Young. The latter’s effective field-goal percentage improves to over 66 percent on passes from Murray this season. (That’s also part of a larger trend for Murray — so far this season, he’s tied for sixth in the league with shooters logging a 67.5 percent effective field-goal percentage on catch-and-shoot looks off his passes.)

The Hawks are relying on Murray finding chemistry with the team’s interior scoring threats as well. Capela (first with 204) and Collins (eighth, 102) rank within the top 10 among all players in lobs finished over the past two seasons. Having access to such effective finishers will mark a new experience for Murray – he made only five lob pass attempts in that same span – but his ability to get downhill and attack the paint should help him adjust.

There are plenty of other ways Murray can affect the Hawks’ bottom line, of course. 

In his final season with the San Antonio Spurs, Murray joined Michael Jordan (1988-89) and Magic Johnson (1980-81) as the only NBA players to average at least 20 points, eight rebounds, eight assists and two steals per game over an entire season. He will be called upon to help improve Atlanta’s 26th-place finish on defense last season, compensating for Young at that end of the court with his quick hands — a league-best 271 deflections last season, per NBA.com — and ability to generate chances in transition. (Atlanta finished 21st among all teams in points scored off turnovers last season.)

Murray’s impact as one of the league’s premier two-way threats is being felt in the early going: The Hawks’ net rating inflates by a team-high 32.4 points with Murray on the court compared to when he sits, including a 21.3-point swing on defense, per NBA.com.

That elevation in performance with Murray on the court goes a long way toward explaining why, despite the Hawks having regressed from a conference finalist to play-in squad over the past two years, Young is confident Murray can help convert Atlanta’s potential on paper into victories on the court — even if it means his personal numbers will be affected as the team implements a new cornerstone.

“Obviously, what I’ma be based off of is winning games, winning championships” Young explained during Hawks media day in September. “Stats don’t do enough. So, for me, that’s been my focus from day one, since I got drafted — and it still is to this day.”

“I’m just trying to win, and with them getting Dejounte, understanding where we were at the end of the season — the playoffs — and knowing what we needed to do to get better, I think, really just showed their commitment to winning.” 

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CORRECTION (Nov. 4, 2022, 5:34 p.m.): A previous version of this story said Trae Young attempted 39 more contested shots in the 2022 playoffs than any other Atlanta Hawk. He actually passed to contested shooters 39 more times than any other Hawk, and he attempted 21 more contested shots than his next-closest teammate.

Basketball

What Happens When Kids Have Access To NBA-Level Technology?

While you’ll commonly see center Kevon Looney putting in work at the Golden State Warriors’ dedicated team practice facility each summer, it’s not his only offseason development location. You’re also liable to find him at a different court, unlike any other basketball gym you’ve ever seen.

His drills aren’t the sort many fans are familiar with, either. During passing exercises, there are no cones or tires to guide Looney; instead, he fires passes at targets generated on a 10-foot-wide interactive screen, which records every impact of the ball and grades his accuracy in real time. There’s no coach or trainer showing him the desired move for each new dribbling drill; Looney watches that same screen for a slow-motion video example, then mimics it. These programs are often combined — a dribble move that flows into a specific pass, or perhaps multiple moves.

As Looney shoots, a video monitor above the basket displays detailed data for each jumper, again in live time: the arc of every shot, plus its precise depth and left-right alignment within the cylinder, down to the inch. If Looney’s shot is off on a given day, he’ll know it right away — and better yet, he’ll know how it’s off.

“I like to get the feedback,” Looney said. “How did I shoot today? Was my shot flat on my misses? What was causing my misses?”

Automatic rebound nets collect Looney’s makes and misses. A proprietary ball-return system can be programmed to pass him the ball anywhere on the court, including alternating shooting locations, allowing Looney to simulate in-game movement.

Must be nice to be an NBA player and get access to advanced tools that no one else does, huh?

Not so fast.

Looney’s location? The Oakland facility for Shoot 360, a company striving to bring modern, technology-infused basketball training to kids, teens and even aspiring — or current — pros. It’s part of a growing new wave of “gamified” training programs making waves in the world of athletic training. Shoot 360 and others in their space bring a simple concept to life: What if average kids could use the same tools as their favorite NBA and WNBA players? 

The potential of this approach is obvious: It can make learning the fundamentals of the game more exciting while also helping younger players improve at a furiously accelerated pace as compared with previous generations. But it also raises questions about what happens when an entire generation of young prospects is developed through NBA-level tools — and who gets to have access to them.

I spoke to people at multiple such organizations, spanning various levels of the basketball world, to learn about this new trend that’s taking player development by storm.

Shoot 360 began, as so many good ideas do, with a bit of family inspiration.

Founder Craig Moody, a former longtime high school and college basketball coach in the Portland area, noticed his oldest son at home with some friends playing NBA 2K. Moody wondered aloud why his eldest, who was just starting competitive basketball, wasn’t outside working on his game; the boys, naturally, said they preferred the video game.

“I walked out and looked at my wife and said, ‘If I could build a gym like a video game, I’d have it made,’” Moody told me. “When I started looking at the technology, I just connected the dots.”

The first Shoot 360 location opened back in 2012 in Beaverton, Oregon. Early facilities had basic basketball technology like rebounding machines and limited stat-keeping, but were still “primitive” compared to today’s iterations, as Moody put it.

Quickly, though, Moody formed an important partnership that remains integral to Shoot 360’s program. Facilities began installing shot-tracking technology from Noah Basketball, a product now used by more than half of the NBA’s teams and across the college game, on every basket within their shooting “cages.” Every shot taken in the gym is tracked on an inch-by-inch basis for arc, depth and left-right alignment as it enters the basket.

Using monitors atop each basket, the partnership allows Shoot 360 to visualize Noah’s data in real time and in intuitive ways designed to aid in shooting development. Shooters try to keep their shots within the “Splash Zone,” optimized ranges of arc, depth and left/right orientation that help guide a shooter toward the ideal jumper.

Various other displays can be toggled on a touch screen at the base of the basket, including dozens of interactive shooting drills and games of varying difficulties, which can be played by individuals, or simultaneously by players either within the facility or on leaderboards throughout the Shoot 360 network.³⁹ Many drills will involve a pre-shot dribble move demonstrated by an on-screen player; others have the player simulate off-ball movement.

Later in Shoot 360’s development came the creation of passing and dribbling station, dubbed the “skill court.” Designed entirely in-house by Shoot 360’s team of software engineers and architects, each station features a 10-foot wide, 7-foot-6 tall interactive screen that directs a player’s activities and measures participants’ accuracy when the ball is thrown against it. Hundreds of game-like exercises can be accessed, many combining dribbling and passing into sequences to build skills.

“Passing is a skill kids don’t work on because you have to have a partner to do it, and it’s boring,” Moody said. “With us, because of the immersive, gamified experience, it’s a blast.”

While instructors are always present to work with players of varying ages and skill levels, Moody said he’s actively looking into further advances like optical player tracking for these stations, which could allow for increased automation such as when coaching proper defensive-stance positioning or running dribble-drill evaluations.

Just as important as the real-time feedback, every member’s stats from both the shooting cages and skill courts are kept in the Shoot 360 app, which allows players to track their progress over the course of weeks, months and years. In other words, youth prospects will have access to mountains of diagnostic data about their performance at an age when earlier generations of players had very little (if any).

“It’s like a basketball Disneyland,” said former Warriors player and current front office staffer Shaun Livingston. Livingston isn’t involved in daily youth development operations, but he’s been to the Oakland facility several times. He said he even brings family to check it out when they’re in town because of how unique the setup is. 

“You’re helping to further the next generation in sports through technology,” Livingston said.

Naturally, such an intriguing concept grew quickly, with Shoot 360 franchises opening up all around the U.S. in recent years⁴⁰, and many of them are operated by current or former NBA and WNBA players. Former Detroit Piston and Indiana Pacer Rodney Stuckey opened the first such facility in Seattle in 2019, with numerous other prominent names following in some capacity, whether through full facility ownership or investment: Trae Young, Breanna Stewart, Jamal Crawford, Sue Bird, Kelsey Plum, Thaddeus Young and more.

Several NBA teams also have gotten aboard. In fact, the building where Looney was working out had been Golden State’s practice facility before the team moved to San Francisco in 2019, building a new practice gym there, too. The old setup was converted into a Warriors-sponsored Shoot 360 facility that quickly became a central part of the franchise’s Warriors Basketball Academy youth program.

While that’s currently the only such arrangement among Shoot 360’s clients, Warriors Basketball Academy vice president Jeff Addiego said they’re looking into adding several more facilities throughout the Bay Area. Meanwhile, the L.A. Clippers have invested in the group’s Torrance, California, facility, which is dotted with Clipper logos. When I visited that location in September, head coach Tyronn Lue and other members of the Clippers’ coaching and front office staffs were in the gym, testing out the equipment. And the Utah Jazz, whose Junior Jazz program has long been one of the country’s largest youth basketball systems, are adding multiple Jazz-branded Shoot 360 gyms in Utah for camps and other youth programs. (A grand opening for one such facility is planned for Nov. 5, per the organization.)

Others are taking the concept overseas. Like Livingston, former NBA center Zaza Pachulia first learned about Shoot 360 shortly after retiring from playing and joining the Warriors’ front office. The concept piqued his interest, so he and Addiego took a short flight to meet with Moody at an L.A. location for what was supposed to be a brief day trip.

“I started using [the equipment],” Pachulia said. “Ben, I missed my flight back because it was so engaging.”

Pachulia was instantly convinced, but he had a different ask for Moody: He wanted to expand the concept overseas. In December 2021, Pachulia helped launch the first European Shoot 360 facility in his home country of Georgia, something he counts as a point of serious personal pride. He told me plans are underway for other facilities throughout Europe, a process he’ll be centrally involved in. 

Pachulia said the interconnectivity between every Shoot 360 facility is a huge draw for the international market. “You can compete against anyone, at any other Shoot 360 facility in the world,” Pachulia said. “It offers you so many options.”

With so much growth in such a short time, it feels inevitable that more is coming. And Shoot 360 is far from the only company employing a virtual, competition-based approach that’s ubiquitous in modern basketball training.

Shortly after retiring from the NBA in 2012, Larry Hughes found himself interested in developing the next generation of basketball talent. He thought he noticed something missing in his hometown of St. Louis, though: standardization and coordination of basketball development programs that would keep kids on a steady track as they moved up the ranks. So he decided to get involved.

In 2015, Hughes partnered with former investment banker Rick Campbell to launch Basketball Training Systems. BTS focused on achieving Hughes’s goal through a combination of approaches, some of which overlap with Shoot 360’s.

For instance, BTS trains fundamentals by having coaches run stations that blend traditional basketball drills with modern equipment. The primary tech used at BTS comes from KINEXON, whose wearable player-tracking tools are used by a number of NBA teams in their practice facilities. Each student is assigned a dedicated sensor that goes in their waistband as they work out and tracks things like distance, speed and jump height. Monitors around the facility display digital court renderings from KINEXON to give students a futuristic look at their own movements, plus various metrics and leaderboard rankings.⁴¹

All of the data is stored permanently for access by members, parents and coaches through BTS’s “Digital Locker” app. Kids can get on their cell phones and judge their progress, or compare stats against their friends. This feeds into another of BTS’s foundational concepts — a martial arts-inspired approach. Specifically, BTS draws from the Kovars martial arts system, which is designed to move kids up through a tiered, consistent program over several years. Instead of wearing belts, BTS students wear colored shirts, starting at white for beginners; new shirts can be earned as students progress through various five-week program cycles and test into new levels based on both the mental and physical components of their development. They can also see how close they are to their next promotion level via the app.

“I think it’s important that we understand how our young people think and how to keep them motivated,” Hughes said. “Like anyone, if you can reach a certain stage and you get a reward, I think that’s an incentive for you to continue on.”

For Hughes and BTS, everything is about maintaining engagement and motivation. When the staff realized early on that kids weren’t responding well to traditional “heat map”-style shot displays on monitors (the kind you might see on NBA.com), they switched to a display that mimicked NBA 2K instead — and immediately saw improved results.

Hughes owns the first BTS facility, which opened in St. Louis in 2015, and has since opened another. Soon after, BTS partnered with Chris Paul, who licenses their programs and technology for his CP3 Basketball Academy in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Bobby Jackson, who played 12 years in the NBA, has the same arrangement with a facility in Sacramento. Five BTS facilities are currently in operation, and the company says four more are set to open within the next few months.

Along with the positives, there are surely potential downsides to training children NBA-style from an extremely young age. If there are criticisms about basketball in the 2020s after hardly a decade of players responding to the incentives of analytics — from shot selection to playing styles — just imagine how those might be accelerated when the league is entirely made up of players raised on tracking data and obsessive optimization. 

Furthermore, the wholesale adoption of this technology is unlikely to be distributed equitably. The move to a more analytically driven and computer-based approach to basketball training could reinforce — if not perpetuate — the sorts of inequalities that have come to define youth sports in recent years.

And yet, who can resist the vast potential to improve through ever-more-personalized and sophisticated training methods?

“I wish I would have had [Shoot 360] as a kid,” Looney said. “I spent a lot of time at the park and at the gym by myself, just shooting and doing random stuff and making up drills. If I was able to use the drills that pros use, and be able to see the numbers and see the data and see how I was shooting and be able to set goals, I think I would have been even better.”

Besides, there’s no stopping the trend. Improvements in optical tracking will soon make facilities like Shoot 360 and BTS even more futuristic. Applications like virtual reality and various Web3-based technologies might not be far behind. These companies have proved capable of bringing these tools to youth while turning a profit; the model is sure to continue growing.

But for Hughes and some of his peers who already are set financially from their playing days, the business side of things isn’t the most important part. There’s a real sense of personal pride in how this can benefit their youth communities.

“When I was coming up, my coaches said we were different than the generation before us,” Hughes said. “I think that’s true whenever you’re working with kids through different eras. … I wish I had some of these gadgets and things I could lock into to perfect the craft. But I can use these tools now to teach it.”

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NBA

The Dallas Mavericks Are Different From Last Year. That Doesn’t Mean Worse.

Despite criticisms of the team's offseason moves, the Mavs may have found a better fit for 2022-23.

By Dorothy J. Gentry

Oct. 28, 2022, at 1:25 PM

“I don’t know if you saw me or not, but I was having fun out there.” 

With those words after a win over the Memphis Grizzlies — in which he scored 25 points — Christian Wood summed up the Dallas Mavericks’ season only a handful of games in. 

Fun. Energetic. Exciting. Electric. 

There are spectacular sitting-on-his-backside passes from Luka Dončić to an open man; dimes to big man JaVale McGee; alley-oops from Dončić to Wood; corner threes from Josh Green; threes from anywhere on the court by a now-healthy-again Tim Hardaway Jr.; there are even big-time contributions from two-way players.

Oh, and the Mavs have sold out their season tickets for the first time in a decade.

It’s early in the season, so the sample size is small, but dare we ask the question: Is this version of the Dallas Mavericks better than last season’s team, which made a surprise trip to the Western Conference finals? Despite dropping two of its first four games, this Mavericks squad appears a little more balanced, in sync and in harmony with one another on the court.

Many, including respected media outlets like ESPN and The Athletic, didn’t think that would be the case after Dallas’s offseason. In fact, the team was sorely maligned by its loyal fan base, the MFFLs, for not hanging onto last season’s second-leading scorer Jalen Brunson, who joined the New York Knicks. They also side-eyed general manager Nico Harrison and team officials for signing the 34-year-old McGee to a large contract, and for not making splashier free-agency moves.

As a result, they were generally picked to land in the lower half of the Western Conference this season, languishing somewhere between sixth and eighth place.

Forward Dorian Finney-Smith was not surprised. “It’s the same thing as last year. I still don’t feel like we get the respect that we should,” he said recently after practice.

“I like being the underdog — even though I feel like people in the league know we’re not anything to mess with. I think they know we’re talented and they’re going to come to Dallas trying to beat us.”

Coach Jason Kidd took the “demotion” in stride, saying the team hasn’t even looked at standings predictions.

“I think we’re just worried about ourselves and making sure that we’re prepared and ready to go,” he said. “Everybody has early predictions, and I don’t know if anybody had us going to the Western Conference finals last year, so we’ll see.”

“Sixth and eighth [in preseason projects]? That’s better than nine and 10, so we’ll see what happens.”

Kidd has a point. Absolutely no one — like, not a soul — at the beginning, middle or end of the 2021-22 regular season had the Dallas Mavericks in the conference finals going up against the juggernaut Golden State Warriors. But that’s exactly where the feisty team found itself.

After losing to the Warriors in five games, the Mavs made moves to address needs like rim protection, rebounding, physicality and perimeter defense. Though it was nothing earth-shattering, Harrison and his team have assembled a roster that potentially has a higher ceiling than last year’s — Dallas’s current full-strength playoff RAPTOR rating in the FiveThirtyEight forecast model (1670) is higher than it was at the end of the 2022 playoffs (1651) — and who seem to fit together better as well.

“Right now this is a new team, we don’t know how good this team can be,” Harrison said. “We did get better in the offseason. JaVale will be great for us, he gives us something we didn’t have last year: shot blocking and high-level rebounding.”

“Wood is a guy that can score at that position and will just add to what we do and it also makes us a different team,” he continued.

Wood is maybe the biggest reason why Dallas could exceed its previous iteration. Picked up in a trade from the Houston Rockets, the 6-foot-10 center is already paying huge dividends — to that point that it looks like Luka may have finally found the Robin to his Batman.

In Dallas’s season opener against the Phoenix Suns, Wood scored 25 points — including 16 in a row for the Mavs — and added eight rebounds. Not to outdo himself, he proceeded to score 25 points with 12 rebounds against the Grizzlies. In doing so, Wood became the first player in Mavs history to score at least 25 points in each of his first two games. And, oh yeah, he did all of this coming off the bench. In that role, Wood appears to be the extra impact player the team’s offense needs to be effective.

That is, if he doesn’t play his way into the starting lineup more often.

“I’m just trying to play hard and do the best I can in the role that I’m in, and that’s really about it,” Wood said. “I’m motivated coming off the bench or starting — either way. I’ve said that before.”

Of course, the other big factor for the Mavs is just how effectively they can make up for the significant scoring they lost from Brunson.

To account for that, the Mavs are hoping more of their offense will come from 30-year-old Hardaway Jr., who was averaging 14.2 points a game when he fractured a bone in his foot in January. He missed the back half of the season, but is back and healthy. Mavs fans have already seen the 3-point shooter and scorer return in even better form. He tallied 16 points in Saturday’s win over the Grizzlies and was a perfect 8-of-8 from the free throw line.

Between Wood and Hardaway, Dallas can find scoring outside of Dončić. And despite the eyebrows raised by his acquisition, Dallas’s rebounding and interior defense should be bolstered by McGee — older, wiser and with three championships in tow (plus an Olympic gold medal) since his first stint with the Mavs back in 2015-16.

After finishing 24th in rebounding last season with just 43 per game, the Mavericks can pair McGee — who averaged 6.7 rebounds, 1.1 blocks in his 15.8 minutes per game with the Suns last year — with Wood to make for an intimidating frontcourt unit.

Together with other smaller moves, all of this has Dallas feeling like it can be as good or better than it was before, particularly in the areas of height, depth and rebounding, despite the offseason shake-up.

“Obviously we lost JB, he was great for us. He gave us so much, you can’t really replace the stuff he gave in one person,” Harrison said of Brunson. “But no one talks about Timmy Hardaway, he’s a scorer you’ll get your points from there. You’ll get your rebounding and blocking shots from JaVale and you’ll also get scoring from Christian so I think you get it all in a different way.”

Still, some think they are still missing a bona fide second superstar. Like Dirk Nowitzki before him, Luka is the only big name on a roster that many believe needs another headliner. 

But Harrison is not convinced. 

“I don’t think it’s just about having All-Stars. There’s tons of teams that have a bunch of All-Stars and they were sitting at home watching us play [in the Western Conference finals],” Harrison said this summer.

“You need to keep upgrading the roster, but I don’t think it’s about just getting a bunch of All-Stars. I think it’s about getting people that fit together — starting with Luka — and people that can fit around him. I think that’s more important than just getting All-Stars.”

With a retooled roster focused around that fit, the question now is can they get back to the NBA’s version of the Final Four.

“There’s a lot of things that have to happen,” Harrison said. “One, we have got to stay healthy. We’ve got to make sure that we keep the same connectedness that we had last year.

“There’s no guarantee, even with staying healthy and playing good basketball, that you are going to go to the Western Conference finals and top it. There’s no guarantee. It takes a lot of luck. It takes a lot of good luck, good matchups, and good fortune. We could have a better team on paper, like we had to start last year, and there’s still no guarantee. The West is tough.”

But if they do get that luck — and the FiveThirtyEight model gives Dallas a 17 percent shot at winning the West, second-best in the conference — this Mavs team has the ingredients to make another run this season, maybe going even further this time around.

Check out our latest NBA predictions.

NBA

Can The Warriors Keep Breaking The Rules Of NBA Title Contention?

By Jared Dubin

Oct. 21, 2022, at 11:05 AM

As the Golden State Warriors embark on their fourth title defense in eight years, they are also trying to do something even more remarkable: bridge two eras together.

From 2014-15 through 2018-19, the Warriors were by far the best team in basketball: They won 44 more regular-season games than any other team during that span, setting a new NBA record for single-season wins along the way. They also made the NBA Finals five times in a row, winning three of them. But at the end of that 2018-19 season, it looked like the Warriors’ dynasty — such as it was — was coming to a close. During that playoff run, which ended in a loss to the Toronto Raptors in the 2019 NBA Finals, we were running stories with headlines like, “How The Warriors Blew A 31-Point Lead,” “The Warriors Are Leaning Into The Death Lineup — And It’s Not Working” and “The Raptors Are One Win Away From Ending The Warriors’ Dynasty.”

So after the Warriors not only lost to Toronto but also suffered major personnel losses through a combination of severe injuries, retirements and free-agent departures, we declared that the Warriors had “lost their religion.” And when Stephen Curry broke his hand early the following season and Golden State limped to a 15-50 finish before being left out of the NBA bubble entirely, and then Thompson tore his Achilles while rehabbing the ACL tear and the Warriors failed to make it out of the play-in round in 2021, it looked a whole lot like this group’s days of contending might be kaput.

Of course, that’s not how things worked out. The Dubs returned with a vengeance last season, looking like one of the very best teams in the NBA from the jump. Despite some bumps and bruises along the way — a multi-week injury to Draymond Green here, the first extended shooting slump of Curry’s career there — Golden State bulldozed its way through the Western Conference playoffs and then dispatched the Boston Celtics to capture what Steve Kerr called his team’s most unlikely title victory yet.

Now the question becomes whether the Warriors can remain among the sport’s inner-circle contenders as their Steph-Klay-Draymond core ages, and if so, how long the next generation — Andrew Wiggins, Jordan Poole, James Wiseman, Jonathan Kuminga, Moses Moody, etc. — can help keep them there. While the Warriors project to be among the league’s elite teams this season, history suggests it could be surprisingly tough for them to go on another sustained, multi-year run of contention so soon after their previous one ended.

How do we know that? Well, we took a look back at modern NBA history (since the 1976-77 ABA-NBA merger) to determine when a team’s window of title contention actually opens, how long those windows remain open before closing, and how long it takes teams to reopen a window once a previous one had closed.

To do this, we first had to establish what actually constituted an open “window.” We decided that making the conference finals was a pretty good barometer of true title contention. If you have a chance to win your conference, you have a shot to win the title. But of course, we wanted to capture the cases of  the occasional teams that do not make it to the conference finals but are still clearly among the best teams in the league that season. So, a team’s title window was also considered open if it met four of the following five benchmarks:

• 50 or more regular-season wins.
• Making the second round of the playoffs.
• Ranking inside the top 10 in both offensive and defensive rating.
• A pace-adjusted scoring margin (net rating) of plus-5.0 or better.
• A plus-5.0 or better rating in Basketball-Reference.com’s Simple Rating System, which adjusts point differential for strength of opponent.

We also considered a window to be open unless a previously contending team failed to qualify for two consecutive seasons. For example, the Miami Heat went to the NBA Finals in 2020 and returned to the Eastern Conference Finals in 2022 but lost in the first round of the 2021 playoffs. Should those 2020 and 2022 teams really be considered part of separate title windows? We don’t think so. But if the Chicago Bulls are contenders from 1989 through 1993, then Michael Jordan retires for a year and a half and then they’re contenders (and then some) from 1996 through 1998, that counts as two distinct title windows.⁴²

Given those rules, here’s a list of all the open title windows for each franchise since the merger:

If you’re counting them up, that’s 89 separate title-contention windows opened by the league’s teams since 1976-77. So the average NBA season has included 5.7 contenders, with a high of eight reached in both 2007-08 and 2020-21.

The average window has remained open for only 2.91 years, though, and the average team has taken 7.83 seasons to get back into contention after a window closes. And that doesn’t even include teams still waiting to reopen their window right now. For example, it’s been 43 seasons since the Wizards last qualified for contender status, 22 since the Knicks did, 19 since the Nets did, 18 since the Kings did and 14 since the Pistons did. If we count the droughts still open, the average team has taken 8.21 years — and counting — to get back into contention.

Of course, the Warriors are no average team. Their title window lasted five seasons before it shut (nearly double the typical length), and they’ve already won another championship in what we’re considering a new window, just three seasons after their previous one closed. (So much for waiting nearly a decade to contend.) 

Perhaps a better historical comparison for Golden State are the teams coming off sustained runs of contention.

Of the aforementioned 89 title windows, 35 were open for just a single season.⁴³ That leaves 54 multi-year title windows to look at; after those closed, it took teams an average of 7.03 years to re-emerge as contenders.⁴⁴ So the Warriors are well ahead of that schedule as well.

However, the Warriors were not just any multi-year title contender, either. Their run lasted a while, and yielded three championships. Among the 54 title windows that lasted multiple seasons, just 18 remained open for five or more years, like the Warriors’ did from 2014-15 through 2018-19.⁴⁵ And the history of that group truly underscores how remarkable the Warriors’ fast return to glory has been. Although teams coming off a five-plus-year run of contention have actually gotten back into the mix faster than the average team, those teams have still taken an average of seven years to reestablish themselves as contenders. And that’s without including the Pistons, Raptors, Thunder and Spurs, whose droughts remain open. 

Additionally, among the 17 contenders that had a five-plus-year window close, only the 1990s Bulls and the 1991 Celtics reopened their window after two years or fewer before the Warriors did so last season. The Bulls’ next run lasted until Jordan retired for a second time and the team was unceremoniously broken up, while the Celtics had just that 1991 season — Larry Bird’s last playing at least 50 games — before they went through a 10-year drought.

In other words, it is really freaking difficult to keep contending in the NBA, and it’s even more difficult to bridge one long title window to another, like the Warriors are trying to do.

The only team that has successfully done something remotely like that is the Spurs. They were fringe contenders early in the David Robinson era, qualifying through our secondary criteria in 1994 and 1996 and making the conference finals in 1995, but they had a disastrous 1996-97 season in which Robinson played only six games before going down with an injury. However, it just so happened that during that season, team president Gregg Popovich fired coach Bob Hill and took over the job himself, then the Spurs landed Tim Duncan with the No. 1 overall pick, helping them embark on a 19-year (!) title window — by far the longest in our database.

Robinson bridged the era to Duncan, who later bridged eras to Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili, who then bridged it to Kawhi Leonard.⁴⁶ That seems a lot like the plan for Golden State, and it’s notable that Kerr has roots with those San Antonio teams, having played there for four seasons. Curry, Thompson and Green are being counted on to not just carry this year’s team, but to pass the torch at some point down the line. That point likely won’t come this season, but given the contracts that Wiggins and Poole signed in recent days, the Warriors surely envision it coming in the near future. It won’t be easy to replicate the Spurs’ success, but Golden State is used to making the improbable look easy by now.

Check out our latest NBA predictions.

NBA

Where FiveThirtyEight And ESPN’s 2022-23 NBA Forecasts Agree — And Disagree

By Neil Paine

Oct. 19, 2022, at 6:00 AM

‘Tis the season for NBA prognosticating, with the league returning to the court for 2022-23 on Tuesday night. We released our forecast, which is based on FiveThirtyEight’s RAPTOR player ratings and projections, last week – you can check out our interactive here. But we aren’t the only ones peering into the crystal (basket)ball: ESPN also released a forecast based its own rating system, the Basketball Power Index, which tracks team strength slightly differently than RAPTOR does.⁴⁷ So we thought it would be fun to see how closely the systems match up and which teams look better or worse in each.

Overall, there is a lot of agreement between RAPTOR⁴⁸ and BPI. (This might be unsurprising to anyone who saw our respective Boston Celtics predictions for the NBA Finals last summer.) The correlation coefficient between the two models’ preseason strength ratings is 0.91, indicating a very strong relationship — generally speaking, RAPTOR likes the same teams as BPI. However, there are some teams that each system likes (or dislikes) slightly more than the other:

Let’s start on the higher-for-RAPTOR side of things, and with a disclaimer: We categorically deny building in any bias toward the team called the Toronto Raptors when creating the metric called RAPTOR — it’s just pure coincidence that “Robust Algorithm (using) Player Tracking (and) On/Off Ratings” happens to spell out that team’s name as an acronym. But it’s interesting nonetheless to see Toronto rank 11 slots higher in preseason RAPTOR (No. 5) than BPI (No. 16). The Raptors are coming off a solid bounceback season from a disastrous 2020-21, and they have a wealth of players with positive projected ratings. But BPI is not at all sold on Toronto’s offense, ranking it just 23rd in the NBA (compared with RAPTOR, which ranks it No. 13).

Other teams RAPTOR likes better than BPI include the Miami Heat (No. 3 in RAPTOR versus No. 13 in BPI), Denver Nuggets (No. 2 versus No. 11) and Portland Trail Blazers (No. 18 versus No. 25). Of the three, the betting markets would probably side with RAPTOR on the Nuggets and Blazers and with BPI on the Heat, since Miami faces conflicting factors that makes its upside less clear-cut.

At the other end of the spectrum, BPI is notably higher than RAPTOR on the Atlanta Hawks and Milwaukee Bucks.

Both systems agree the Hawks have an elite offense — BPI ranks it No. 1 while RAPTOR ranks it No. 2 — but disagree about their defense. BPI has Atlanta ranked No. 9 on D, while RAPTOR pegs the Hawks’ defense at No. 17. Both would be upgrades over their No. 26 finish in defensive efficiency last season, but the contributions of newcomer Dejounte Murray (who carries a good defensive reputation but average RAPTOR ratings at that end) will go a long way toward determining which metric more accurately judges Atlanta’s potential.

For Milwaukee, the difference is more on the offensive side of the ball – although the two systems’ disagreement on the Bucks is fairly comprehensive. BPI has Milwaukee ranked No. 4 on offense and No. 12 on defense — in line with the team’s performance last season — while RAPTOR flips that around to a No. 19 ranking on offense and No. 4 ranking on defense.⁴⁹ Some of that owes to the injury Khris Middleton is still recovering from (remember, these are all current ratings), which takes a bite out of Milwaukee’s projected rotation strength. But even though RAPTOR expects him to be available for most of the regular season, it still calls for the Bucks to win fewer than 50 games.

The market definitely thinks BPI is closer to the truth when it comes to Milwaukee, and I can’t disagree much. But that’s the beauty of looking at different systems, particularly when they arrive at their projections in different ways: You learn something new whenever you pop open the hood and start poking around. And you can keep track of how both systems view your favorite team all season long by checking out ESPN’s BPI playoff odds and team ratings, and our NBA predictions dashboard.

Check out our latest NBA predictions.

Design and development by Jay Boice, Rachael Dottle, Ella Koeze and Gus Wezerek. Statistical model by Nate Silver. Additional contributions by Neil Paine. Illustration by Elias Stein.