Purely for you analytic enthusiasts. Likely boring for everyone else!!! It seems like there have been a lot of OT games during the first series of these playoffs. I was wondering how this stacked up to the regular season. There was no information available, so I set out to figure out the percentage of overtime games during the regular, and playoff season. In the regular season there were 75/1230; 6.1% of games went in to overtime. In the playoffs there have been 6/26; 23.1% of games going into OT. There were 2/32; 6.2% ot games in the first 32 games of the 13-14 season (I including 6 extra games because there was 1 ot game on 11/1/14 and I am not counting based on the tip off time). And 3/27; 11.1% ot games in the last 27 games of the season. In the regular season head to head match's vs playoff opponents IE: Memphis Vs Oklahoma City, Portland Vs Houston, Brooklyn Vs Toronto; there were a total of 2/31 overtime games 6.4%(Houston Vs Portland, Miami Vs Charlotte) There are two interesting points to this statistic. A.) You would assume that this percentage would be closer to the Playoff average of 23.1% OT games B.) While it is actually very similar to the 6.1% of total OT games during the regular season. As far as regular season matches vs playoff qualified teams In the East: 1) Indiana had 4/42, 9.5% overtime games Vs playoff qualified teams 2) Miami had 4/44, 9% OT games 3) Toronto had 7/41, 17% OT games 4) Chicago had 2/42, 4.7% OT games 5) Washington had 6/41, 14.6% OT games 6) Brooklyn had 4/41, 9.7% OT games 7) Charlotte had 6/42, 14.2% OT games 8) Atlanta had 4/43, 11.6% OT games All together the East had 13/127. 10.2% cumulative regular season OT games played vs other eastern playoff qualified teams. Now lets look at the west...(Prior to checking out the statistics I predict that the west will have played more OT games Vs teams in their conference than the east and their 10.2% of regular season OT games vs Eastern Conference playoff teams.) In the West: 1) San Antonio had 2/43, 4.6% OT games 2) Oklahoma City had 4/42, 9.5% OT games 3) Los Angeles Clippers had 1/41, 2.4% OT games 4) Houston Rockets had 3/43, 6.9% OT Games 5) Portland had 5/41, 12.1% OT games 6) Golden State had 5/42, 11.9% OT games 7) Memphis had 3/42, 7.1% OT games 8) Dallas had 5/42, 11.9% OT games All together the West had 9/93, 9.6% of cumulative regular season OT games played vs other western playoff qualified teams. Take note that Los Angeles Clippers had the lowest percentage of OT games vs Playoff qualified opponents at 1/41 or 2.4%. Edit: I have a complete list of all 16 playoff teams and their Games Played/Overtime games vs the other 15 Playoff teams. I'm not going to post it now because it would be a massive wall of text. If anyone is curious enough about a specific team, or wants to see all head to head OT stats let me know and I can post them! Tomorrow I will go back over OT games to give a better idea of the team by team, and conference by conference breakdown. I also think I will update this throughout the playoffs. The numbers seem pretty consistent through the regular season with a large increase in the playoffs. I'm not going to attempt to explain these percentages (very speculative and would take a long time) however they are definitely worth watching IMO!!!
Updated with a lot of extra information, going to be keeping my eye on this during the playoffs. I'll be sure to update, and perhaps look at comparing this years differential to that of years past.
