One of the biggest storylines of the 2010 playoffs has obviously been the Boston Celtics' totally unexpected postseason turnaround. From late December through the end of the regular season, the Celts were a very mediocre ballclub (literally average: they were .500 after Christmas), but in the playoffs they have looked -- and played -- like a completely different team, very nearly channeling the dominance of their 2008 championship squad. And lost amid the stories of Boston's playoff about-face has been the fact that the Lakers, owners of barely an above-average offense during the regular season, have morphed into an offensive juggernaut once again, as they were during the 2008 and 2009 regular seasons. In the history of the NBA, have any Finalists changed their identities more during the playoffs?
To answer that question, let's briefly go back to yesterday's post... There, I introduced a method of estimating team offensive and defensive ratings (points scored and allowed per 100 possessions) for years prior to 1974, which essentially opens up all of NBA history to us for studies like this (except 1951 -- unbelievably, they didn't even track rebounds that year). Today I want to use the same framework to see which Finalists most outperformed what we would have expected their playoff offensive & defensive ratings to be, given their regular-season numbers and the RS numbers of their playoff opponents.
You might think the most similar Finals matchup to this week's upcoming Celtics-Lakers showdown is the one that took place between the same teams just two years ago. After all, most of the cast of characters is exactly the same as it was in '08, with the primary superficial differences being that Andrew Bynum is available for L.A. this time, Rajon Rondo has improved from a role player to a legit star for Boston, and Ron Artest was added to the Lakers in Trevor Ariza'sVladimir Radmanovic's place.
However, the 2010 versions of both teams are actually dramatically different from their '08 incarnations when you look at their offensive & defensive performances relative to the league. To study this, I wanted to look at how said performances stack up to those of past NBA Finalists, and what the most comparable historical matchup is to this year's Lakers-Celtics duel. In order to measure offensive and defensive efficiencies for teams that played before 1973-74 (when the league didn't track the necessary data to calculate possessions), I had to develop a way to estimate possessions used from the stats that were kept back to 1951 (before 1951, they didn't even track rebounds!). I found that the best formula to predict a team's possessions used from the basic team totals that existed going back to 1950-51 was this:
Yesterday, we had a discussion about Kobe Bryant's surprisingly Vince Carter-esque numbers in career "crucial" games (defined as a Conference Semifinal game or later; Game 3 or later; series tied, within 1 game either way, or an elimination game for the trailing team). A commenter brought up the possibility that Bryant had faced tougher defenses than other stars in his playoff career, so today I'm going to run the numbers for players since 1991 and see who actually has faced the toughest defenses in their playoff careers, first in all games, then just in "crucial" games.
Marv was at his best in that clip, practically lending biblical overtones to John Stockton's feats in Game 4, and I was so inspired by Albert's proclamation that Stock "seized the moment like few others in NBA history" that I wanted to find the players who had the best career performances in crucial games like that Game 4.
Over the weekend, I was invited to participate in NBA.com's Blogger Q&A with TNT analyst/2-time NBA champion Kenny "The Jet" Smith, so I asked him a question about the format of the Finals and how it felt to have home-court advantage (and disadvantage) in the NBA Finals. Many thanks to YouCast and the NBA for setting this up!
At the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in March, Mavs owner Mark Cuban remarked that he could tell which teams used advanced stats and which didn't simply by looking at who their most frequent lineups were. For instance, some teams put out combinations where Cuban said he understood why the coaches thought it would be good for the team, but the +/- numbers showed that the team was losing badly when that group was on the floor. So one way of evaluating coaches is to look at their most frequently-used lineups and see how they match up with a list of the team's most effective lineups by either adjusted +/- or, in the absence of that, raw +/-. Here's how the remaining four coaches (Alvin Gentry, Phil Jackson, Doc Rivers, & Stan Van Gundy) have been doing so far:
What is it about the Phoenix Suns and Staples Center this season? The Lakers are a good home team, having gone 34-7 with a +8.5 PPG differential in L.A. this season, so that's a big part of the explanation. But when Phoenix plays them there, their problems seem to go further than typical home-court advantage effects -- look at the difference between the Suns' Four Factors at Staples and at the US Airways Center:
As an announcer, Mark Jackson sure loves to repeat himself. Whether it's "Mama there goes that man," "Hand down, man down," or my personal favorite, "Grown man move" (clip unavailable), Jackson's canned go-to phrases are a staple of any ESPN broadcast -- especially when cutting to a commercial break, serving to punctuate an important replay with, well, words that have lost all meaning.
Recently, though, Jackson's been repeating another comment he began to make during Rajon Rondo'striple-double vs. Cleveland two weeks ago. Here's a variation from Saturday night:
A short mailbag entry today, courtesy of a question from BBR reader Luka:
"What is the record for the lowest top scorer for a team in a NBA game?"
Well, we only have game-by-game box score data back to 1986-87, but in that span, the "record" for fewest points leading a team is 8 -- it was set on March 6, 2004, when Denver's Carmelo Anthony, Jon Barry, Earl Boykins, Marcus Camby, Voshon Lenard, and Rodney Whiteall scored exactly 8 vs. Detroit:
The Nuggets lost the game by 31 points, though... The fewest points by a leading scorer in a win? Avery Johnson & Vernon "Mad Max" Maxwell scored 10 apiece to lead San Antonio over Cleveland on March 25, 1997, in what had to be one of the most unwatchable games in NBA history:
One of the biggest storylines of the 2010 playoffs has obviously been the Boston Celtics' totally unexpected postseason turnaround. From late December through the end of the regular season, the Celts were a very mediocre ballclub (literally average: they were .500 after Christmas), but in the playoffs they have looked -- and played -- like a completely different team, very nearly channeling the dominance of their 2008 championship squad. And lost amid the stories of Boston's playoff about-face has been the fact that the Lakers, owners of barely an above-average offense during the regular season, have morphed into an offensive juggernaut once again, as they were during the 2008 and 2009 regular seasons. In the history of the NBA, have any Finalists changed their identities more during the playoffs?
You might think the most similar Finals matchup to 
At the