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Please note: the comparisons were generated using stats through Friday’s games. I don’t think they would have changed much over the weekend, but keep it in mind.
In my last article, I used statistical similarities to look at how this season’s Thunder and other NBA teams compared to past NBA teams, and used those comparisons to look at how the 2011 teams may fair in the second half and playoffs. A lot has changed in the NBA since I posted that article, with the Thunder going on a bit of a hot streak before cooling off recently, so I wanted to take a renewed look at the comparisons, using network diagrams to help illustrate my points. Read more…
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The Thunder is a team that’s hard for me to put a finger on. They are on pace to have the highest FT% and highest percent of total points to come from free throws in league history. Whenever a team is on pace to set an NBA record, it by definition is unprecedented, but the Thunder are peculiar in other ways, too. OKC’s top 3 or 4 players are perimeter players that mostly get their points from scoring inside or going to the line, while the big men shoot at a high percentage from outside. Are there any precedents for a team like this, and can we learn anything from these similar teams? That’s what I’m hoping to figure out in this column.
I don’t have the basketball knowledge or memory (or age for that matter) to just watch the Thunder play this season and tell you exactly which team they are most like, especially if you want to look back deep into NBA history. That’s someone else’s forte. I’ll stick with what I know, and that’s the numbers. So, statistically speaking, I’m going to try to determine which teams are most like the 2010-2011 Thunder, and hopefully these comparisons will put some perspective on how the Thunder are doing so far, and what we might expect from them for the rest of the season.
There have been a couple implementations of NBA statistical similarity used in the past. Neil Paine of Basketball-Reference had an article with NBA team similarity scores based on the Four Factors (eFG%, ORB%, FTR, and TOV%. If you don’t know, read the link, it may change your life). The article was pretty great, and his methods seem to produce good results comparing the most important parts of NBA success. However, the Four Factors aren’t everything. They capture the areas of efficiency for a team, but they don’t capture much of how the efficiency happens. For example, eFG% is the most important Four Factor, but there are many different ways to achieve a high eFG%. Good 3-pt shooting, post play, or a fast pace are all common methods to generate a high eFG%, but these playing styles are very different. The thinking is, as a season goes on, and as a team enters the playoffs, certain combinations of strengths and weaknesses could perhaps translate better to success, and the Four Factors method may or may not miss this. Read more…
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In the first quarter of the Thunder season opener, the announcers were talking about Jeff Green. Hubie Brown I think said “When Jeff Green is playing well, the Thunder are hard to beat.” Obviously, when a player on any team is playing well, we would hope and assume that the team plays better. But how much better? And do some players tend to tip the scales more than others?
I went into this with no good guess about who tends to determine the outcome of Thunder games more than others. You could make the argument that if Durant plays well, we will win, because he’s so much of the offense and when he’s playing well, he’s playing really well. At the same time, if someone like Thabo or Serge lights it up, its more unexpected, so maybe their play is more influential in determining if the Thunder win or lose.
I decided to do this a little more visually and a little less mathematically than I would normally tend to, because it’s a study where its so hard to control for all the variables. So first I went about scoring all of last regular season’s games, to rank which were the most impressive and which were the least. To do this I just took the scoring margin of each game and added or subtracted the opponent’s average scoring margin, to account for degree of difficulty. By this method the November 8th rout of Orlando (by 28!) was our best game of the season, which seems about right, though Vince Carter did not play. Read more…
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