Denver and Houston, whatever else they might have to worry about, are OK with playing slow.
Ty Lawson and JaVale "Pierre" McGee of the Denver Nuggets.
Via: Matt York / AP
The NBA playoffs are a different beast than the regular season. You know this. I know this. We all know this. The pace of the game slows to a crawl as players expend maximum energy on defense; moving the ball or beating your man down the floor becomes harder, while the more physical D also leads to more fouls that interrupt the flow of the game. Any team that normally plays fast is D.O.A. unless it can figure out a backup strategy.
We've all heard this said, and probably said it ourselves. But is it true? I looked at the question specifically in reference to this year's most prominent run-and-gun teams, the Denver Nuggets and the Houston Rockets. The Nuggets hold the Western Conference's third seed, and beat Golden State in the first game of their series Saturday. The Rockets are an eighth-seed underdog against West favorite Oklahoma City, where they were blown out last night. Their playoff success obviously depends on a lot of factors, but will a slower pace be one of them?
I first checked to make sure the pace of the game was actually slower in the playoffs. On that issue, at least, the conventional wisdom is correct. Over the last five years, teams average somewhere between two and 4.5 fewer possessions per game in the playoffs than in the regular season. That may not seem like much at first glance, but here's another way of putting it: the average playoff pace in 2011, for example, was lower than the slowest regular-season team's pace.
So the game does get slower. How does pace influence offensive output? Let's look at Denver and Houston. Both teams spent most of the season playing at impossibly fast speeds. The league average number of possessions per game this season was 92.0. Denver's pace was 95.0, Houston's an even more ridiculous 96.2, a full two standard deviations above the mean (HIDE THE KIDS! MATH TERMS!). They're also two of the most efficient offensive teams in the league. Even adjusted for pace, Denver and Houston were the fifth- and sixth-best offenses in the league, respectively.
But are they able to score so efficiently BECAUSE they play fast? It sounds like a reasonable assumption — teams that play fast will get more easy baskets in transition, and they'll create quick scoring chances before the opposing defense is able to set up. You might expect them to tend to play worse in games in which they don't get quite as many of these easy chances as they're used to. So I charted each game of Houston and Denver's seasons besides their last one, which they hadn't yet played while I was doing the research. That's 81 games for each team. On one axis I put the number of possessions they had, their "Pace Factor." On the other, their offensive efficiency. If they had a problem playing slow, we should see a slanted line: lower efficiency in games with lower pace.
