Editor’s Note: The following is a guest post from torridjoe of Loaded Orygun, examining the Portland Trail Blazers and their scoring totals.
I won’t claim to speak for hoops fans worldwide, but certainly in the United States we’re a pretty simple folk: we like obvious outcomes and big numbers. Hockey and soccer, with their draws and points for winning but maybe sometimes also for not winning, that’s too weird. We reject the metric system, despite worshipping the base 10 ground it walks on when it comes to sports.
Baseball, for instance. Yes it has an obscene number of games, but what’s the standard for a great season? 100 wins. Why? It helps that it happens just often enough–and if you look at those who make the cut each year (if any), it’s hard to have a team unworthy of the achievement. Making 100 is also still a media and contract-term notable for things like RBI and Runs, although exceeding them is much more routine in the modern era. In America’s new favorite sport, football, it’s 100 yards rushing or receiving in a game that makes you a success that day.
Ultimately I think it’s computational laziness, but it’s also a cultural affect at this point. Thank Taco Bell in part, at least when it comes to the Portland Trail Blazers, where a triple digit effort wins the assembled a free mexiproduct item on their next Blazeriffic visit to a nearby prefab Bell.
Free tortillas can act as either a champagne-filled slipper after victories or a tear-inducing salve for losses, borne with dignity and maybe a little heartburn after. But you have to figure if they kept giving them out in a season full of 100-point futility, Señor Bell might opt not to fill his stores with moody, moochy fans. So that’s my (tongue in cheek) evidence that 100 is also a meaningful bar in basketball games–because Taco Bell is counting on it being a fourthmeal party after home wins.
Now that we’ve established 100 as a benchmark offensive effort (as long as we’re not talking about the Westhead Era when 120 was so-so output), it’s time to test out its revelatory powers. If you’re a Blazers fan you’ve heard team broadcasters talk about their strong record when they can top 100. Because of their slow pace and a mental sense that they did usually win when cracking the century, I never resisted.
And until the streak was recently broken, they also made a big fuss of the Blazers’ ability to win whenever holding opponents below 90. I thought that was impressive, but I wasn’t sure–isn’t under 90 kind of sucky for any team, and tough to overcome?
So I snagged some free results for the 2009-10 season through last Friday from the excellent Basketball-Reference.com, massaged them a bit and tested out the notion that 100 points is usually good enough for a win, and less than 90 is usually going to leave you bumming. I was particularly interested in the Blazers so you’ll get that bias, but I’ll also share a Google Doc you all can copy and play with.
So if you made it under the virtual cutline here, hopefully you won’t be too put off further by some necessary but buzz-killing caveats to the results and conclusions below:
- Points per game rarely tell the whole story, particularly when it comes to accounting for pace and offensive efficiency.
- I don’t expect these results to be necessarily predictive, but rather a window into the success or failure NBA teams have had so far this season.
- I will at times refer to home and away splits; I have this data but for brevity’s sake am not including them in the stats posted online. If you want them email loadedorygun-at-gmail and I’ll send you the base Excel 2003 file with splits. It’s 1.5MB, FYI. Or you can create a file yourself at BB-Ref.com, above.
- Finally, some teams have more 100pt games to work with than others, and some have more 90-pt flops than others. A small number of games will definitely skew percentages for those teams, so consider a given success rate to be tempered by how many games it’s based on.
Whew! The truly hungry only must remain, I’m sure. But it’s actually a pretty surprising set of results compared to what I expected, so you’ll be rewarded I hope. I’ll give you the ending now since you’ve been patient so far: both measures are pretty darn associated with success. Correlated? I haven’t checked, should in the future, maybe after the season. But related, no doubt.
Over 1000 times this year a team has scored 100 or more (sometimes both teams in the same game, obviously). Those teams won 70% of the time. If you’re the home team and you do it, that goes up to 81%. Even on the road it’s worth a win 60% of the time–a pretty powerful effect in my opinion, because winning on the road is hard as a rule in the NBA. That shows in the 20% difference between the two splits, in fact.
Even more striking to me is what is portended if you score fewer than 90. As I said the Blazer announcers made a big deal of the streak, as if it’s not a big surprise to score fewer than 90 and still win. But oh, it is. Sub-90 games have happened almost 400 times so far this season, and it’s got an 87% kill rate. That’s right, fail to score 90 and you are likely to have lost that game 87% of the time.
What’s fascinating is that there’s no home/away effect for that metric. Home sub-90s lose 88.7%, away failers 89.1%. (Games under 90 do happen somewhat more often on the road, but that still had no apparent impact on the split). So either way, better score 90–or not only is there no chalupa, it could be a sad plane ride or a busted postgame buffet coming for your team very soon in the future.
Back to the 100-win stat: the Suns have scored 100 or more 61 times, and the Warriors are next with 54, followed by the Nuggets, Jazz and Raptors at 49 and the Cavaliers at 45. The bottom six all have fewer than 25 100+ finishes on their resume, down to the Nets with just 13. The Blazers are in the healthy middle with 33 of 72 through Friday–a number that may surprise some people, and certainly is a testament to their high efficiency.
Notice that a large number of 100pt games can be very good (Suns, Nugs, Jazz) or not so good (Raptors, Warriors). This makes Cleveland‘s 43-for-45 record in games where they score 100 kind of mind-blowing, both to have that many games, and to still post a 96% win rate. Charlotte is next at 91%, but they’ve only done it 23 times. The other teams topping 90% are the Lakers (in 41 games) and Celtics (in 30, a testament to their tough defense I’m sure). So if 70% is average, 90% is a high bar of excellence, even if you don’t have many 100pt games.
The Blazers just make the top half in 100pt success rate; they are 25-8 in those games, or 76%. On the road they are one of the more successful high scorers in the league, with wins in 65%. Let the Blazers top 100 in your house, and you darn well better take care of business at the other end.
But for all of the joking I did about Taco Bell linking free chalupas to a likely victory, don’t tell Señor Bell the shocking truth: by far, the LEAST successful 100pt home performers in the NBA are the Portland Trail Blazers. And they’ve not been shy about it either: 16 times so far the fans have gone home couponed, but only FIVE times has a win accompanied them on their happy way. Five of sixteen! At home! The next worst are the Pistons at 46% and no one else is even under 50%, not even the Nets–who are oddly 4 for 4. Fire KP!*
So scoring 100 points doesn’t mean a whole lot to the Blazers, despite them being thought of as a lower scoring team. It’s part of their ability on the road that they can score well, but boy at home it’s almost like a voodoo curse–better to crush someone 88-59 at the Garden, apparently. But it sure does seem to mean something to the rest of the league; the success rankings run down like the conference standings, starting with the Cavs and Lakers on down through the Celts, Magic, Thunder, Mavs, Nuggs — it’s a fairly parallel grouping.
Turning to the Curse of 90 (89, really): here’s two things to know about scoring less than 90: more than 1 in 4 teams lost every game it happened to them in. Further, only two teams won even half of the time — exactly 50% at that, and one team was just 1-for-2.
For 28 teams in the NBA it truly is a Led Zeppelin to your victory chances if your Nineties aren’t Gay enough, but there is one team out there that boldly steps onto the court, fails to score 90 points routinely (14 times so far) — and is still even money to beat you down, when most of the league wins maybe a couple of times by chance. That team of course is the Portland Trailblazers, with seven big wins while scoring under 90.
It gets better: OK, so statistically there’s no effect between home and away, but c’mon — how disciplined and system-focused do you have to be to go into someone else’s house of sport seven times, score under 90, and win four of those games? That’s impressive, to me. Scoring under 90 happened just 394 times through Friday, and teams won precisely 50 of those 394 — seven of them by one team.
God bless the New Jersey Nets, who at least will not go down in history immemorial for their overall futility this year. But they’ve failed to hit 90 in 33 games so far, and are still waiting for a win in any of them. As I said, a lot of teams don’t have a win that way, but oh-fer-33….yeesh. So they are the model team for this analysis: perfect when scoring 100+, and also, uh, perfect when scoring sub-90. (Also the least 100+ and most sub-90 team).
My final thought on this subject was to wonder if these two benchmarks represented the poles of a hypothetical sweet spot, where if you could do one or the other–score 100+ or hold your opponent under 90–you’d be golden almost every time. Sort of like jumping the 10th hurdle before they’re just getting over the 9th. (Because basketball and hurdling, very much alike).
So I compiled totals for every game in which either the team scored 100+, or held their opponent below 90, and also whether they won. The Suns had the most games where either (or both, which would count as one) happened, at 63. It would appear 61 of those are from them scoring 100+ rather than holding teams under 90, and the Warriors are the same way: 54 100+, 55 total. The Magic look like the combo studs here, with 39 100+ games and a total of 54 doing one or the other.
The Trail Blazers fare well here, rounding out the top third for ‘100or90‘ games at 48. They are also a strong mix of both types, like Orlando. Of course pace is an issue here, but it speaks very well of Portland’s ability to make its system work, that it can thrive in a slowdown environment and still hit that 100 regularly, while also frustrating opponents into not even getting to 90. To me it’s a classic case of “if we play my game I win.” The Blazers have won because they have gotten many opponents to play their game.
It’s notable that the ratio between 100 and 90 is closest for Boston and Charlotte, teams that thrive on defense and can really play the halfcourt game well. Roughly half of their total 100or90 games — and both have more than 40 — are due to holding down opponents. They may not be scoring 100 tonight, but if not, you’re not even going to make 90.
As to whether it’s a MasterLock Solid Gold Lock of the Week if your team scores 100 and/or stifles the opponent under 90, probably — but most markedly so if your team is on the way to the playoffs, it appears (which suggests that the ‘100or90‘ success rate is actually a function of overall success and not a marker of it). The only likely playoff teams out of the top 16 in 100or90 success rate are the Suns at #17 and Toronto at #21. Also, the two top teams in success rate are Cleveland and the Lakers, and the two worst are the Warriors and the Nets. That’s a good validation.
Special shout out to those Golden Staters, for managing to score 100 or hold their opponents below 90 a whopping 55 times so far this season. That’s really quite a lot. And hey, we know that it’s definitely a good thing to have these kinds of games, because they’re usually sure winners when you can get one. So how have the Warriors done? 20-35. A win one third of the time. Based on how everyone else does, that’s tough to do, I think.
If you take one lesson from this exercise, perhaps it’s this: as you sit on your couch and watch ball, and you start to doze off and have a momentary pang of worry that you’ll miss an exciting finale for your favorite team, project whether you think they’ll get either more than 100 or fewer than 90. If so, sweet dreams, your team is likely a safe winner/loser — UNLESS you’re a Blazers fan. In that case run out for another latte, hustle back and watch the finish…it’ll be a good one.
* No, please God, no no, that was a joke, please no….we’re sarcastic, Blazer fans! Cynical young punks, really! So, please…please, really.
You can also read this piece that torridjoe wrote three weeks back, predicting that the Blazers would hit 50 wins this season.
