Part of the Soccer Mom mentality that sportswriters pin on Blazers fans is that we feel like we never get ref respect, that the refs are always giving the opponent more free throw attempts than us. I'm not going to take a stand on whether this is a conspiracy against us or whatever, but I did want to look at the data to see if we were at least justified in thinking we used to get respect, but don't anymore. I used a super-simple formula: our FTA/game versus our Opponent FTA/game. I scoured basketball-reference.com for 35+ years of data (1982-83 - 2017-18), and tallied up the results: In short, there's never been a streak of years like we've had where we've shot so many fewer FT's than our opponents. And, we've never experience any single year discrepancy as big as the last three years. Even this year, which is already a massive improvement over last year and two years ago, would be the biggest discrepancy in the last 35 years if the two previous years didn't exist. Right or wrong, I can see where fans would (a) become bitter about this even if they could only feel it as generally unfair treatment, and (b) maybe begin to form conspiracy theories as the feeling of unfairness continues year after year after year. But we're four years running now on this... maybe this is why we hired a former ref.
Corellation isn't causation... ...but do you think maybe the only reason we're at 2.0 versus a higher 2.8 or 3.0 discrepancy is because we've faced teams resting starters A LOT this season (see HCP's thread)?
That could explain. Is there any breakdown in those foul statistics between on the floor fouls vs shooting fouls? Is there a drop off or a large change in free throws per game post Paul Allen\ David Stern feud?
Interesting, but it doesn't really account for personnel and style of play. I'd be really curious to see if ex-Blazers (Aldridge, Matthews, Batum, Lopez, Crabbe, etc.) suddenly start getting fouled at higher rate (FTr) after they leave Portland, and if newly acquired players (Nurkic, Harkless, Turner, etc.) see a significant decrease in FTr after joining the Blazers. BNM
I tried to compensate by having a huge data set instead, encompassing many players, play styles, and coaches over the last 35 years. These last three years in particular are unusual: they are consecutive (we rarely see such a discrepancy so many years in a row), and they are large. Individual player FTr is a good rabbit hole but I only have so much time in my lunch hour.
When was the feud? As for floor versus shooting, the data isn't good the further back you go; I wanted a big data set to compensate for year to year oddness, so I needed a basic stat that's been consistent for decades.
You might be able to get at it with Personal Fouls per FT Attempt. It'd take a bit of time to do though.
