FiveThirtyEight.com Articles on Spurs

[bluebellmaniac]

Some interesting analysis on the Spurs from FiveThirtyEight. If you are not familiar with them, they do a lot of statistical analysis and are most popular for picking elections. Nate Silver is worshiped by the networks as an election prognosticator guru. The website and Nate have done a few articles on the Spurs recently, I will post links in this thread.

Spurs An Outlier In Unselfishness (http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/the-spurs-were-an-outlier-of-unselfishness/): The popular narrative for the NBA Finals that just concluded is pretty straightforward: The San Antonio Spurs “play basketball the way it’s supposed to be played (http://www.reviewjournal.com/columns-blogs/matt-youmans/san-antonio-spurs-get-payback-backers-get-payout),” and they beat the star-studded Miami Heat in what Zach Lowe called “the triumph of the NBA’s beautiful game (http://grantland.com/the-triangle/san-antonios-revenge-scenes-from-a-championship-run-for-the-ages/).” The Spurs’ offense whipped the ball around, and Miami couldn’t handle such a multifaceted attack. The Heat, on the other hand, were forced to rely on what is increasingly becoming their Big One. LeBron James was epic (https://twitter.com/skepticalsports/status/478392391167377408) throughout (https://twitter.com/skepticalsports/status/478387349752401920) the playoffs and had an MVP-quality performance (https://twitter.com/skepticalsports/status/478385375464128513) in the finals, but the top-heavy Heat collapsed under their own weight.A variety of statistics back up this description of the difference between the two teams, if not the normative judgment. For example, the Spurs had nine different players take four or more field goal attempts per game throughout the playoffs, compared to just six for Miami. More advanced statistics show something similar.
One stat we can use to see how much offensive responsibilities are being spread around is “usage rate (http://www.basketball-reference.com/about/glossary.html),” which estimates ...

[bluebellmaniac]

The Spurs’ Deconstruction of the Heat Is Now Complete (http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/the-spurs-deconstruction-of-the-heat-is-now-complete/): For the fifth time and in one of the most dominating fashions the NBA Finals has ever seen, the San Antonio Spurs won the title on Sunday night. The Spurs beat the Miami Heat, 104-87, their third consecutive double-digit win.How dominant were the Spurs? San Antonio led the league in per-100-possession point differential during the regular season at +8.1. The Spurs were +13.0 or better in all four of their Finals wins. ...

[bluebellmaniac]

The Spurs Crush the Heat Again, But in a Different Way (http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/the-spurs-crush-the-heat-again-but-in-a-different-way/): Same song, different verse.

The San Antonio Spurs — after defeating the Miami Heat in Game 4 of the NBA Finals on Thursday night — are one win away from a title. The score wasn’t close, 107-86 — the second game in a row that San Antonio dismantled Miami. But in Game 3, it was the Spurs’ offense overwhelming the Heat’s defense with a cascading set of inside-outside and side-to-side actions. In Game 4, the Spurs’ offense continued to perform at a high level, but it also tightened the screws defensively.
The Heat scored at a rate of 99.1 points per 100 possessions in Game 4, more than 13 points lower than Miami’s playoff average. ...

[bluebellmaniac]

Stop Betting Against Gregg Popovich (http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/stop-betting-against-gregg-popovich/): The San Antonio Spurs’ Gregg Popovich won his third NBA Coach of the Year Award (http://espn.go.com/nba/story/_/id/10821444/gregg-popovich-san-antonio-spurs-nba-coach-year) on Tuesday. To an extent, these awards are about which coach most exceeds expectations: They’re the opposite of coach firings (http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/in-the-nba-its-not-whether-you-win-or-lose-its-whether-you-beat-vegas/), which are better predicted by a coach’s performance relative to preseason Las Vegas over-under lines than by his win-loss record. Popovich’s Spurs won 62 games in the regular season — more than the 55.5 wins Vegas predicted (http://www.sbnation.com/nba/2013/10/28/5037930/vegas-odds-nba-over-unders-2013-14). That’s reasonably impressive, but nothing as compared to the Phoenix Suns’ Jeff Hornacek, who finished second in the balloting after winning 27 more games than Vegas anticipated.

What’s more amazing is how Popovich and the Spurs keep beating even consistently high expectations. From the 2006-07 through the 2013-14 seasons, the Spurs have outperformed their preseason over-under lines by a cumulative 35.5 games. ...

[bluebellmaniac]

To Find a Career Like Tim Duncan’s, We Have to Go Back to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/to-find-a-career-like-tim-duncans-we-have-to-go-back-to-kareem-abdul-jabbar/):

Tim Duncan turns 38 on Friday. On Saturday, he’ll resume his quest for a fifth NBA championship when the San Antonio Spurs travel to Dallas to face the Mavericks in the third game of their first-round playoff series. Duncan is still an extremely effective player, in part because his masterful coach (http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/stop-betting-against-gregg-popovich/), Gregg Popovich, limits his minutes in the regular season. We might not have seen a career quite like his since Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
Duncan has been a force since he entered the league at 21. In his debut season, 1997-98, he won the Rookie of the Year award and made the All-NBA team. The next year he was named NBA Finals MVP and won his first championship.
I wondered which other players in the NBA, and in the other major team sports, have had so much impact over their full professional lives. In other words, which of them were both very effective as young players and as old players? ...

[bluebellmaniac]

The Heat’s Whac-A-Mole Problem (http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/the-heats-whac-a-mole-problem/): Game 3 of the NBA Finals featured the San Antonio Spurs’ offense at its best. It wasn’t just its 19-point margin of victory over the Miami Heat, 111-92, that impressed, or its 41 points in the first quarter, or that it made 75.8 percent of its shots in the first half; it was the way the players did all this Tuesday night: running their system and taking what the Heat gave them. The aggressiveness of San Antonio’s Kawhi Leonard and Danny Green was key in the Spurs’ hot start. Usually these two function primarily as finishers. But in Game 3, Leonard and Green attacked mismatches and closeouts, looking to drive the ball to the basket. The NBA’s SportVU Player Tracking Statistics (http://stats.nba.com/playerTrackingDrives.html?pageNo=1&rowsPerPage=25) showed that drives (defined as any non-transition touch that starts at least 20 feet from the basket and is dribbled within 10 feet of the basket) by Leonard and Green were more frequent and more effective than usual. ...

[Thomas82]

This is some good stuff!!