Surviving winters with soup and basketball
We are now just over 1/4th of the way through the NBA season, so in celebration I decided to repost my thoughts on over-under lines from a couple months ago. Golden State makes me feel like a genius when I was really making a desperate attempt to be funny. The Bucks? Not so much. They’re almost halfway to their over-under line of 24.5. (These lines were taken from the Westgate SuperBook, by the way.)
Anyway, take a look. There’s blood from a few bad predictions, for sure.
The West may have finished Week 6 over .500 at 15-10, but the East put a dent in the record-breaking point differential after laying some smackings on them. Those were mostly thanks to the Toronto Raptors and Washington Wizards as they went a combined 4-0, each win by eight or more points.
It wasn’t too pretty for the rest of the East teams in non-conference play. Chicago, Detroit, Indiana, and Milwaukee all went winless, a combined 0-9. At least Philadelphia scored their first win of the season…on the road…against a West team. (Dammit, Minnesota). The undefeated West teams last week with multiple non-conference games were Dallas, Golden State, Oklahoma City, and Portland. Utah and Denver went winless. COOL.
Below is the updated non-conference stats through Week 6, and below is a screenshot of the scores from all the games. Thought I’d include them in case anybody was curious.
Statistically, Week 6 may have been the East’s best showing so far. I mean, there’s even a loss by San Antonio. GOOD GRIEF. It’s between Week 2 and 6 for the best, which is pretty pathetic since the East finished neither of them over .500.
Week 7 is a slightly shorter non-conference schedule with 20 games versus the 25 we saw the last two weeks. There’s also finally a home-road edge for the West, though a small one.
Cleveland, Detroit, Miami, and New York take road trips out west while the Clippers and Blazers will or are already playing multiple games on East courts. The other teams with multiple games this week are Indiana, Milwaukee, Washington, Denver, Memphis, New Orleans, Oklahoma City, Phoenix, and Utah. For the West, only San Antonio and Sacramento are on the non-conference schedule but with only one game.
FUN STUFF. Kevin Durant is back, so we’ll see him in what looks like a great matchup vs Cleveland on Thursday night. There are some other goodies like Portland-Chicago, Clippers-Washington, and a good ol’ repeat of the 1999 NBA Finals in San Antonio versus New York. The Spurs still have the same roster, pretty much. Kind of crazy that Tim Duncan, Tony Parker, and Manu Ginobili all came together only a few years after that first title.
ANYWAY. If you somehow made it to the end of this post, I’d recommend checking out Zach Lowe’s column about non-conference disparity and Ziller’s fantastic piece about a solution for it. I’ll roll out at least a couple of more posts this week, including an addition to the My Soup section. Unfortunately it’s not really soup but weird stats I’ve put together. They don’t taste like anything and if they smell bad it’s probably you. Sorry.
Have a good week, though.
A while ago, I tweeted 1998 and 2015’s league-average point distributions in the form of a radar chart. Chicken Noodle Hoop is definitely pro-radar charts despite their flaws, so I’ll expand a bit on that tweet here. In case you missed it being sent out, had me muted (understandable) or blocked (well, whatever), here it is again:
https://twitter.com/FattMemrite/status/539887057024589824
Since radar charts don’t show exact numbers, below is a table of point distribution from 1998 to 2015. Numbers were used from what’s available on the lovely NBA.com:
The mid-range game continues to decline in the distribution of points, but very slightly from 2013-14 to 2014-15. Not too much has changed from last season to this one, which shouldn’t be too surprising.
Looking through slides from year to year, the change over 17 seasons is subtle until going from 2015 back to 1998 when, um, WHOA.
Maybe it’s next season, maybe it’s in the year 2020, but the point distribution could eventually take on the shape of a triangle. We can only imagine how awkward a chart from the 1980s would look like.
This was a super short post, though. I’ll fiddle more with this type of stuff as the week goes on. Radar charts are back from the dead, for better or for worse depending on how you feel about them.
With just over a month of NBA in the books, I decided to round up a couple random stats and put them here. This post went on the silly side of things as I looked at half-court heaves, which are unfortunately not doing too hot compared to last season when I posted a few (a different link for each letter!) thoughts.
Below is a look at 2001 to 2015’s numbers, via Basketball-Reference’s Shot Finder tool. The numbers are a bit different from previous posts. Since Casper Ware’s half-court shot last season was logged from 46 feet instead of the ~50 that was obvious on film, I gave the Shot Finder a two-foot cushion, increasing the range of shots to 45-94 feet. This isn’t meant to needle Basketball-Reference. Getting exact shot locations and the time the attempt was taken, among other things, is not easy.
Anyway, below are the numbers this season. I also added another column looking at how many points the heaves would have to be worth to reach an average of one point per attempt.
Four-point line? How about one worth 40 points? If this ever happens, some fans are getting max contracts.
John Henson is the only player to make a shot from beyond half-court this season, because I don’t know. Jamal Crawford leads the league in most attempted heaves with three, somehow not creating four-point plays on all of them. Some surprising names to attempt a shot or two: Joakim Noah, Dwight Howard, Gorgui Dieng. Weeeeeeeee
2015 is behind 2014’s pace in made heaves, though. Not too surprising since 2014 was the second-best heave percentage ever tracked, but 2015 is also in contention for the least-accurate ever. It even looks like 2015 is behind 2014’s pace is in attempted heaves, which, I don’t know. I’ll try to remain optimistic. MOAR HEAVES C’MON.
Stay tuned over the rest of the season for more heave updates. Until then, have a good heavening. /Hides
(Not my best attempt to go off of the “same soup just re-heated” line.)
With the West going 18-7, Week 5’s end result was a bit like what we saw in Week 4 when they beat the East 18 out of 21 times. That means the West is 36-10 in their last two weeks despite 10 less home games. Fun times.
Week 5 actually looked interesting through Monday’s set of non-conference games. The East went 3-3, including Indiana beating Dallas on the road, but then the West took care of business. Golden State went 4-0 in non-conference games last week while Houston, the Clippers, Portland, and San Antonio each went 2-0. New Orleans lost both of their non-conference matchups. Meanwhile, Kobe Bryant and the Los Angeles Lakers are somehow 3-0 against the East after last night’s win against Toronto. (We will miss you, DeMar DeRozan.)
It also looks like the West also got a bit more brutal thanks to Oklahoma City getting back Crazy-High Usage Russell Westbrook. They’re something of a feature team in Week 6’s matchups as they play two non-conference games over next weekend:
The home court advantage the East enjoyed the last two weeks is mostly gone. They play one more home game this week than the West, a mehhh 13-12 edge. They do have something of a rest advantage, though: 5-2 edge in games where one team has one or more days of rest compared to an opponent on the tail-end of a back-to-back.
But dang, this could be another bad week for the East in the wins and losses. Boston, Detroit, Indiana, New York, Orlando, and Philadelphia play a combined 14 games with Indiana and Orlando on road trips out west. Philadelphia’s arguably best chance to get their first win comes on the road against Minnesota. For someone about 45 minutes from Minneapolis, I really hope the Sixers get their first win in Oklahoma City instead.
For the most common teams in the West, they aren’t packing too much strength this week. Denver, the Lakers, Sacramento, and Utah play a combined 10 games. They’re no pushovers, but no Memphis Grizzly-type either. Dallas (three games), Golden State, the Clippers, Memphis, Portland, OKC, and San Antonio play combined 13 games.
Hopefully there are some upsets in the East’s favor. In the meantime, I’m really going to try and add some more posts this week. We’re just over a month into the season, so maybe time for a roundup relating to that.
Chicken Noodle Hoop 