I love basketball-reference.com I was curious how this team stacked up against previous incarnations of Blazers teams to get a feel for just how amazing this year has been and there are some really surprising things that popped out. By their metrics this is easily one of the top ten teams in franchise history: http://www.basketball-reference.com/teams/POR/ 7th best in terms of winning percentage 7th (with a chance for 6th) in terms of number of wins 9th in SRS (simple rating system that accounts for point differential and strength of schedule) 1st in terms of offensive efficiency (!!) 1st in offensive rating changing from one season to the next (in a positive way). I'm kind of blown away when I start to look at everything this team has done this year -- Unreal.
Cool stats! If we get the 6th best record, will we also have the 6th best winning percentage, or would a strike shortened season still be above us? Which seasons are above us for those records and the SRS?
Yeah, the strike shortened 1999 season would still have a higher percentage. With all of the talk about how close we were in the 2000 season, I had forgotten how good we were that year as well, and 2001 was also very good.
You can sort all of the stats in the link by column header, but suffice it to say that the teams ahead of us were mostly conference finalists or went to the finals.
Here's an interesting tidbit: When looking at SRS (which is simply ORtg minus DRtg), The 08-09 Blazers are 9th. Of the 8 teams above the 08-09 Blazers, only one (the 00-01 Blazers in 8th) lost in the first round. The Championship Team of 1976-77 is 7th.
Nope, that's not what SRS is, it's simply point differential weighted with strength of schedule, but the point is taken that this team is pretty close to the cusp of being a contender ... at least by the numbers.
Sorry, it just looked a lot like ORtg - DRtg to me when I glanced at the 1990-91 team: 1990-91 ORTG = 112.8 / DRTG = 104.3 / SRS = 8.47 / ORTG-DRTG = 8.5 My bad. Of note about the SRS: the 1976-77 team had the best SRS in the leauge that year.
Update: with our win against OKC, we passed the 2000-01 Blazers in SRS. This is important to me, because they were the only Blazer year ahead of us that didn't get past the first round. We're now right behind the 1976-77 Blazers in SRS standings among Blazer teams.
That team also imploded down the stretch (if memory serves me correctly). Whittsit's experiment finally blew up in his face ... guess he should have been a chemsitry major after all.
Yep. They had the best record in the league on March 5 and hadn't lost more than 2 in a row all season. Whittsit overloaded the roster with 12 guys who all wanted starters minutes and they instantly lost 5 in a row (including two to lowly Vancouver - the 2nd worst team in the league that year). They lost 13 of the last 21 and dropped all the way from best record in the league to 8th seed in the West between early March and mid-April - and were swept in the 1st round of the playoffs. BNM
I totally forgot we had Will Perdue on the 00'-01' team. It's not like he was an impact player though so I understand why I forgot
This team exceeded my expectations in so many ways I can't begin to list them. I think I picked us to win 47-48 with Martel. But it was never really about the number of wins, it was just about improving in all the different areas and gaining experience. Mission accomplished.
So we're the most efficient offensive teams in Blazer history, but actually one of the worst defensively. Even in 04-05 when we only won 27 games, we had a better defensive rating. What's up with that?
DRtg can be seriously influenced by pace. When we were losing a lot of games, we'd try to win by slowing the game way way down and preventing the other team from running away with us. Our wins were grind-em-out, but we played every game that way. A good way of looking at our defensive impact is the difference between ORtg and DRtg (represented in a normalized way by SRS, which takes strength of schedule and point differential into account). If our ORtg is significantly higher than our DRtg, we're definitely doing something right. When you sort on SRS, you see the cream rightfully rise to the top.
