A never seen before team statistic cooked up by your Nuggets insanity specialist... I took assists per game and divided them into pace, which is the average sum of offensive and defensive possessions per game, to come up with what I think I will call "Quality of Offensive Flow". I don't want to oversell it by calling it "Quality of Offense," because the quality of the offense is also determined by pace adjusted unassisted scores and other, lessor factors. But this performance measure tells you to what extent the offense has an effective and efficient flow to it or, in other words, how many assists there are relative to the pace of the team. In still other words, this is going to tell you how effective and efficient the passing game is for each team. Teams that rank high on this tend to be teams that: 1. Have good to excellent point guards. 2. Have good to excellent basketball offense coaching. 3. Have well designed offenses with some effective and efficient set plays included. 4. Have relatively unselfish players. 5. Are teams that basketball watchers most like to watch. Teams that rank low on this tend to have the reverse characteristics and need to spend a lot of effort in the off-season trying to bring their offenses up to speed. Unfortunately for those who think that offense is more important than defense, this measure by itself can not predict who is most or more likely to go far in the playoffs or to win the NBA Championship. But stay tuned, because in subsequent posts I am going to end up with a never published before measure that DOES give you a good idea of who is going to go far in the playoffs and contend for the Championship, and that reveals who the "pretender" teams are. You can see that the Nuggets ranked a relatively high 7th in this despite the facts uncovered in my dismantling of the Nuggets point guard disaster. And they ranked a relatively high 7th despite the fact that Nuggets fans have come to believe that they have a team filled with selfish statistical padders, with Iverson leading the way. But like other apparent Iverson bum raps of history, an investigation shows that this turns out to be yet another bum rap. For the record: the Nuggets are NOT a team filled with selfish stat padders. Charles Barkley was wrong after all! And I never claimed that the Nuggets had a bad offensive flow. Rather, I claimed that the Nuggets could have a better offensive flow than they did have had they done the things I wanted them to do. At the very least, they should have had a better offensive flow than the Los Angeles Lakers, who do not by any stretch have one of the best point guards in the League. QUALITY OF OFFENSIVE FLOW Assists/Pace 1 Utah 0.3102 2 Phoenix 0.2808 3 Toronto 0.2683 4 New Jersey 0.2608 5 Los Angeles Lakers 0.2593 6 Detroit 0.2584 7 Denver 0.2515 8 Boston 0.2500 9 New Orleans 0.2466 10 Atlanta 0.2447 11 Portland 0.2431 12 San Antonio 0.2408 13 Chicago 0.2405 14 Houston 0.2399 15 Milwaukee 0.2386 16 Dallas 0.2365 17 Miami 0.2365 18 Indiana 0.2362 19 Charlotte 0.2359 20 Los Angeles Clippers 0.2329 21 Golden State 0.2300 22 Philadelphia 0.2282 23 Orlando 0.2266 24 Cleveland 0.2252 25 Seattle 0.2242 26 Washington 0.2220 27 Minnesota 0.2199 28 New York 0.2071 29 Memphis 0.2051 30 Sacramento 0.2047 By far, the highest quality offensive flow in 2007-08 was run by the Utah Jazz, with the Phoenix Suns a ways behind in 2nd. Jerry Sloan may be old school, but the quality of his coaching is mind boggling. The Toronto Raptors were third best. The New Jersey Nets, the Los Angeles Lakers, and the Detroit Pistons were just about tied for 4th-6th, and then the Denver Nuggets were the 7th best offensive flow team. Rounding out the top ten were the Boston Celtics, the upstart and extremely well coached New Orlenas Hornets, and the young but very promising Atlanta Hawks. The New York Knicks just wisely hired the Coach of the team with the 2nd best flow, the Suns, to coach their team that had the 3rd up from the bottom offensive flow this past season. That Coach, Mike D'Antoni, has got his work cut out for him. Coming next: Quality of Defensive Flow of NBA Teams.
Here are the actual points scored adjusted for pace (points per 100 possessions). OFFENSE EFFICIENCY Points Per 100 Possessions (2007-08) 1 Phoenix Suns 115.8 2 Los Angeles Lakers 114.9 3 Golden State Warriors 113.7 4 New Orleans Hornets 113.6 5 Orlando Magic 113.6 6 Dallas Mavericks 113.1 7 Detroit Pistons 112.5 8 Toronto Raptors 112.2 9 Boston Celtics 112.1 10 Denver Nuggets 112.1 11 Washington Wizards 110.4 12 San Antonio Spurs 109.1 13 Sacramento Kings 108.9 14 Utah Jazz 108.7 15 Portland Trail Blazers 108.4 16 Atlanta Hawks 108.3 17 Houston Rockets 108.2 18 Indiana Pacers 108.0 19 Cleveland Cavaliers 107.5 20 Philadelphia 76ers 107.3 21 Memphis Grizzlies 106.7 22 Milwaukee Bucks 106.6 23 Charlotte Bobcats 106.3 24 New York Knicks 105.6 25 New Jersey Nets 105.6 26 Chicago Bulls 105.2 27 Minnesota Timberwolves 104.9 28 Los Angeles Clippers 102.9 29 Miami Heat 102.2 30 Seattle SuperSonics 101.7
If you combine the two above, you would have the best overall measure of how good each team's offense is, because you would be considering both the points and the assists per 100 possessions. Assists are important not only because it says so in the basketball training books, and because all good coaches want a lot of assists, but because assisted scores are harder to defend against in general and especially in the NBA playoffs than are non-assisted scores. Iverson on an isolation play gets shut down in the playoffs more often than he does in the regular season. And you can forget about making a long run in the playoffs if you don't rank high in assists per possession (quality of offensive flow). So if we add the ranks above, here are how the NBA offenses stacked up in 2007-08: REAL NBA TEAMS OFFENSE RANKING (2007-08) Rank for Quality of Offensive Flow combined with Rank for Offensive Efficiency 1 Phoenix Suns 3 2 Los Angeles Lakers 7 3 Toronto Raptors 11 4 Detroit Pistons 13 5 New Orleans Hornets 13 6 Utah Jazz 15 7 Boston Celtics 17 8 Denver Nuggets 17 9 Dallas Mavericks 22 10 San Antonio Spurs 24 11 Golden State Warriors 24 12 Atlanta Hawks 26 13 Portland Trail Blazers 26 14 Orlando Magic 28 15 New Jersey Nets 29 16 Houston Rockets 31 17 Indiana Pacers 36 18 Milwaukee Bucks 37 19 Washington Wizards 37 20 Chicago Bulls 39 21 Philadelphia 76ers 42 22 Charlotte Bobcats 42 23 Sacramento Kings 43 24 Cleveland Cavaliers 43 25 Miami Heat 46 26 Los Angeles Clippers 48 27 Memphis Grizzlies 50 28 New York Knicks 52 29 Minnesota Timberwolves 54 30 Seattle SuperSonics 55 Note that the New Jersey Nets have a great offensive flow and passing game, but they just don't have enough guys who can score well to be a top offensive team. But if they ever got Carmelo Anthony.... The Nuggets were 7th in offensive flow quality and 10th in scoring efficiency, which made them tied with the Celtics for 7th best offense in the NBA.
Okay, getting back to the new performance measure, here it is for defenses. Denver Nuggets fans may want to run and hide now. I'm warning you this is going to be disturbing to say the least. Teams that rank high in this are teams that tend to: 1. Have good defenders in general. 2. Have smart defenders who know where to be and where to go on a play. 3. Have smart coaches who can help prepare a team to play smart and tough defensively. 4. Have players who are good at disrupting the flow of the other team's offense, up to and including forcing turnovers. 5 Have defenders who hustle a lot. 6. Have defenders who know how to play good man to man defense without fouling a lot. QUALITY OF DEFENSIVE FLOW Assists/Pace of Opponents 1 Phoenix 0.2061 2 San Antonio 0.2087 3 Boston 0.2098 4 Houston 0.2119 5 Dallas 0.2128 6 Detroit 0.2213 7 Indiana 0.2310 8 Los Angeles Lakers 0.2327 9 Utah 0.2338 10 Orlando 0.2342 11 Cleveland 0.2365 12 Chicago 0.2383 13 New York 0.2392 14 Portland 0.2408 15 Charlotte 0.2414 16 Golden State 0.2433 17 New Jersey 0.2453 18 Sacramento 0.2454 19 New Orleans 0.2455 20 Toronto 0.2469 21 Los Angeles Clippers 0.2472 22 Atlanta 0.2481 23 Miami 0.2500 24 Memphis 0.2553 25 Minnesota 0.2564 26 Seattle 0.2568 27 Milwaukee 0.2586 28 Philadelphia 0.2595 29 Denver 0.2617 30 Washington 0.2707 Oh my god, the Nuggets are almost dead last in terms of what offensive flow they allow! In other words, they allow almost everything compared to other teams. I now have gotten to the bottom of confusion regarding the Nuggets defense. Some have been looking at points given up per 100 possessions, which the Nuggets rank surprisingly high on, and have been claiming the Nuggets defense is not all that bad. But they didn't know about this never seen before performance measure, which shows that the Nuggets are total losers when it comes to stopping scoring that comes out of passing and assisting. The confusion is now explained: the Nuggets are not anywhere near as good a defense as the points per 100 possessions given up suggests, because for one thing, in the playoffs, teams can run over the Nuggets simply by ramping up their passing game and assisting. This is exactly what the Lakers did; they passed and assisted more than they usually do to run all over the Nuggets. The Nuggets have to become a smarter team defensively or there is no hope for them, because this investigation shows that they do hustle and try on defense, and they do have some man to man defending skills, but they get totally burned by a good passing game. They have to learn to rotate, defend the pick and roll, and guard the perimeter far better than they did this year or they will never get anywhere. The Nuggets are especially terrible in disrupting/preventing the 3-point shot, which becomes especially deadly in the playoffs. Also, the Nuggets are going to have to force more turnovers if they hope to ever win in the playoffs. This discovery also means that the Nuggets can not afford to be the fastest pace team in the NBA on offense, because they are almost clueless with respect to defending during a fast paced game. They would be smart to play at a much slower pace, so that they would have a chance to improve on their terrible defensive flow measure. I'll be discussing this in more detail in future reports. The big shock here is that the Phoenix Suns edged out the San Antonio Spurs as the best defensive flow team. Although the Suns gave up more points than the Spurs, and slightly more than the Spurs in points per 100 possessions, they were about equal with them in assists given up adjusted for pace. This is so far as I know a fact not known by anyone, including the Suns, and it makes the trade of Shawn Marion for Shaquille O'Neal look even more stupid than it already did, because the Suns were overestimating their defensive weakness when they made that trade. The Boston Celtics, the Houston Rockets, and the Dallas Mavericks, in 3rd-5th, are also extremely good at disrupting the offense of their opponents. The Detroit Pistons are the 6th best defense in terms of flow. The Pacers are 7th, the Lakers 8th, the Jazz 9th, and the Magic 10th.
Here are the points allowed per 100 possessions (points allowed adjusted for pace). Notice how the Nuggets are a surprisingly high 10th. One thing this shows you is that the Nuggets, led by Marcus Camby and Kenyon Martin, have defenders who are very to extremely good at shutting down unassisted scores, but they lack players who know how to keep the passing game and outside shooting in check. Do I dare say this is another reason why J.R. Smith should have played more, since although he does get burned from time to time, at least he puts out a big effort to be as far from the hoop as necessary to disrupt the passing lanes and the perimeter shooting of the other team? Damn straight I dare to say it, and I just did say it. DEFENSIVE EFFICIENCY (2007-08) Points Allowed per 100 Possessions 1 Boston Celtics 100.2 2 Houston Rockets 103.0 3 San Antonio Spurs 103.6 4 Detroit Pistons 104.2 5 Utah Jazz 105.9 6 Orlando Magic 107.0 7 Los Angeles Lakers 107.1 8 New Orleans Hornets 107.1 9 Dallas Mavericks 107.4 10 Denver Nuggets 107.5 11 Philadelphia 76ers 107.7 12 Cleveland Cavaliers 108.0 13 Chicago Bulls 108.6 14 Toronto Raptors 108.6 15 Indiana Pacers 109.0 16 Phoenix Suns 109.3 17 Portland Trail Blazers 109.9 18 Atlanta Hawks 110.4 19 Los Angeles Clippers 110.8 20 Golden State Warriors 111.0 21 New Jersey Nets 111.0 22 Washington Wizards 111.2 23 Charlotte Bobcats 111.3 24 Seattle SuperSonics 111.3 25 Miami Heat 111.6 26 Sacramento Kings 111.6 27 Minnesota Timberwolves 113.4 28 Memphis Grizzlies 113.7 29 New York Knicks 114.2 30 Milwaukee Bucks 114.4
Now we can find out who really are the best defensive teams in the NBA. Once again, I combine the flow measure with the raw points measure by adding the ranks for each team. REAL NBA TEAMS DEFENSE RANKING (2007-08) Rank for Quality of Defensive Flow combined with Rank for Defensive Efficiency 1 Boston Celtics 4 2 San Antonio Spurs 5 3 Houston Rockets 6 4 Detroit Pistons 10 5 Utah Jazz 14 6 Dallas Mavericks 14 7 Los Angeles Lakers 15 8 Orlando Magic 16 9 Phoenix Suns 17 10 Indiana Pacers 22 11 Cleveland Cavaliers 23 12 Chicago Bulls 25 13 New Orleans Hornets 27 14 Portland Trail Blazers 31 15 Toronto Raptors 34 16 Golden State Warriors 36 17 New Jersey Nets 38 18 Charlotte Bobcats 38 19 Denver Nuggets 39 20 Philadelphia 76ers 39 21 Atlanta Hawks 40 22 Los Angeles Clippers 40 23 New York Knicks 42 24 Sacramento Kings 44 25 Miami Heat 48 26 Seattle SuperSonics 50 27 Washington Wizards 52 28 Minnesota Timberwolves 52 29 Memphis Grizzlies 52 30 Milwaukee Bucks 57 The Celtics, the Spurs, and the Rockets are just about tied as the best defensive teams in the NBA, with the Pistons not far behind in 4th. The Jazz, the Mavericks, the Lakers, Magic, and Suns are all excellent defensive teams, ranked close together from 5th through 9th. The Indiana Pacers (Coach Jim O'Brien) are the 10th best defensive team. The Nuggets are tied with the 76'ers as only the 19th/20th best defensive team in the NBA, not even remotely good enough to contend in the playoffs. There are only 10 teams in the NBA with worse defenses than the Nuggets! The bad news is that the Nuggets defensively made fewer improvements and were worse than most people thought this year. The good news is that they have interior defending pretty well down, and so they can concentrate all their efforts on outside defending, passing game disruption, and forcing turnovers. That is, that's what they will do if they are smart. But damn, the coaches are not known for being smart.
Now how about net or combined quality of flow. This is quality of offensive flow minus quality of defensive flow for a team. Obviously, you need to combine offense and defense to find out how good a team is overall. This will tell you how good a team is at passing and getting assists and at the same time how good it is at stopping the other teams from passing and getting assists, with everything adjusted for pace. OFFENSIVE FLOW OR ASSISTS/POSSESSION MINUS DEFENSIVE FLOW OR OPPOSITION ASSISTS/POSSESSION In hip hop terms, what are the NBA's best "flow teams"? (Who would have thought the best flow team is in Salt Lake City, Utah?!) 1 Utah 0.0764 2 Phoenix 0.0747 3 Boston 0.0402 4 Detroit 0.0371 5 San Antonio 0.0321 6 Houston 0.0280 7 Los Angeles 0.0266 8 Dallas 0.0236 9 Toronto 0.0214 10 New Jersey 0.0155 11 Indiana 0.0052 12 Portland 0.0023 13 Chicago 0.0022 14 New Orleans 0.0011 15 Atlanta -0.0033 16 Charlotte -0.0055 17 Orlando -0.0076 18 Denver -0.0102 19 Cleveland -0.0113 20 Golden State -0.0133 21 Miami -0.0135 22 Los Angeles Clippers -0.0143 23 Milwaukee -0.0200 24 Philadelphia -0.0313 25 New York -0.0321 26 Seattle -0.0326 27 Minnesota -0.0365 28 Sacramento -0.0407 29 Washington -0.0487 30 Memphis -0.0502 As you can check above, the Nuggets are 7th in offensive flow and 29th in defensive flow, so it is no surprise they end up about in the middle when both are combined. They end up a dismal 18th in flow achieved minus flow allowed. The most important thing all of this says about the Nuggets is as follows. The Nuggets are never going to win a playoff series unless they can get a lot better at disrupting passing, disrupting assisting, and disrupting perimeter shooting of opponents, and unless they can force more turnovers. In order to have even a chance of doing this, they are going to have to slow their pace down. I promised that I would eventually get to a never before published performance measure that DOES help predict the real contenders from the pretenders. This combination of offensive flow and defensive flow is as you can see a good predictor of who is going to go the farthest in the NBA playoffs. Assists are more important in the playoffs than in the regular season because defending is touger in the playoffs and you need more passing and assists to overcome that. The final 4 NBA teams, the Celtics, the Pistons, the Lakers, and the Spurs, are all in the top 7 of this performance measure. The other three among the top 7 are the Jazz, the Suns, and the Rockets. The #1 Jazz are the NBA's best flow team so to speak, but they did not have enough actual scoring production to be able to defeat the Lakers. The acquisition of Kyle Korver was moving in the right direction, but it was not enough. And the #2 Suns were toppled by the Spurs largely because of the mistake they made in trading Shawn Marion for Shaquille O'Neal. As for the the 6th place Rockets, they were without Yao Ming and they were defeated by the 1st place Jazz in the quarters.
Lastly, what if we combine everything above and see how the teams rank? We are combining: 1. Quality of offensive flow 2. Quality of defensive flow 3. Offensive Efficiency 4. Defensive Efficiency Here we go: 1 Phoenix Suns 20 2 Boston Celtics 21 3 Los Angeles Lakers 22 4 Detroit Pistons 23 5 San Antonio Spurs 29 6 Utah Jazz 29 7 Dallas Mavericks 36 8 Houston Rockets 37 9 New Orleans Hornets 40 10 Orlando Magic 44 11 Toronto Raptors 45 12 Denver Nuggets 56 13 Portland Trail Blazers 57 14 Indiana Pacers 58 15 Golden State Warriors 60 16 Chicago Bulls 64 17 Atlanta Hawks 66 18 Cleveland Cavaliers 66 19 New Jersey Nets 67 20 Charlotte Bobcats 80 21 Philadelphia 76ers 81 22 Sacramento Kings 87 23 Los Angeles Clippers 88 24 Washington Wizards 89 25 Milwaukee Bucks 94 26 Miami Heat 94 27 New York Knicks 94 28 Memphis Grizzlies 102 29 Seattle SuperSonics 105 30 Minnesota Timberwolves 106 And there you have it. These 4 performance measures when combined together perfectly predicted who was going to be the final 4 teams in the NBA this year. For the record, the Jazz finished tied with the Spurs for the last slot. Wait a minute you say, what about the Suns? The Suns forfeited their right to play the Lakers for the Western Conference crown when they traded Shawn Marion for Shaquille O'Neal. They had an inferiority complex regarding their defense, which as we have seen was not as bad as they were thinking it was before they made that trade. Once O'Neal was on the team, the Suns no longer were really in the top 4 of the NBA. The Spurs added insult to injury by using the hack-a-Shaq strategy against the Suns, which really and truly needs to be made illegal as soon as possible. Notice that it turns out that Mark Cuban had a right to be upset with Avery Johnson, because the Mavericks should have done better in their Hornets series than they did. As for the Nuggets, they are only the 12th best team in the NBA, way behind the top 11, and only a little ahead of the next three. As we have discovered, their biggest problem by far is not defense in general but is with certain kinds of defending. Namely, they are terrible at disrupting passing, preventing the assists that come from a good passing game, defending outside shooting, and defending the 3-point shot.
<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (tremaine @ May 29 2008, 06:12 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}></div><div class='quotemain'>The most important thing all of this says about the Nuggets is as follows. The Nuggets are never going to win a playoff series unless they can get a lot better at disrupting passing, disrupting assisting, and disrupting perimeter shooting of opponents, and unless they can force more turnovers. In order to have even a chance of doing this, they are going to have to slow their pace down.</div> <div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (tremaine @ May 29 2008, 06:36 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}></div><div class='quotemain'>And there you have it. These 4 performance measures when combined together perfectly predicted who was going to be the final 4 teams in the NBA this year. For the record, the Jazz finished tied with the Spurs for the last slot. Wait a minute you say, what about the Suns? The Suns forfeited their right to play the Lakers for the Western Conference crown when they traded Shawn Marion for Shaquille O'Neal. They had an inferiority complex regarding their defense, which as we have seen was not as bad as they were thinking it was before they made that trade. Once O'Neal was on the team, the Suns no longer were really in the top 4 of the NBA. The Spurs added insult to injury by using the hack-a-Shaq strategy against the Suns, which really and truly needs to be made illegal as soon as possible.</div> The Suns' pace isn't that far behind Denver's, and you said yourself that they were even better before they traded for Shaq and slowed the pace down. Why have they managed to stay at the top so long, even coming within bad luck with injuries and suspensions at the wrong time of winning at least one or two championships, when teams like Denver and Golden State can't get past the bottom of the playoff seeding? It seems to me that while it might be harder to win at that pace, it is still quite possible if you have the right mix of coaching and players.
<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'>The Suns' pace isn't that far behind Denver's, and you said yourself that they were even better before they traded for Shaq and slowed the pace down. Why have they managed to stay at the top so long, even coming within bad luck with injuries and suspensions at the wrong time of winning at least one or two championships, when teams like Denver and Golden State can't get past the bottom of the playoff seeding? It seems to me that while it might be harder to win at that pace, it is still quite possible if you have the right mix of coaching and players</div> You answered yourself: the Suns had a dream mix of coaches and players. I guess Suns management concluded that Coach D'Antoni is too much of a geek or something, because they should have kept him. Now the Suns future is not very bright it seems to me. As you can see above, the Suns were by a good margin the best offense in the NBA. I say were because that will no longer be true now that the older Shaq is on this team. They didn't know that they were about the 9th best defense in the NBA; they thought before they did the trade that they were about the 15th best defense or something. They underestimated how good their defense was, so they made a bad trade for a bad reason. I think that the Suns would have won the title in 2006-07 were it not for the Horry-Stearns incident, and they could have won the title this year were it not for the trade. It probably would have been a 7 game series between the Lakers and the Suns for the West crown. Neither the Warriors nor the Nuggets have top 6 offenses (Nuggets are #8 and Warriors are #11) While the Suns are 9th in defense, the Warriors are 16th and the Nuggets are 19th. So neither the Warriors nor the Nuggets were ever at the level of the Suns. What upsets me is that the Nuggets should be about 3rd or 4th on offense if they just recognized the importance of the PG position, which is Basketball 101. They could even be 1st now that Shaq is on the Suns. If they were the 3rd or 4th best offense, they would have more to show for their fast pace and for their lazy and inept defense.
