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This means our regular season win % (roughly 62%) is better than our playoff win % (roughly 55%)
Still great though!
This also means that we still have the #1 regular season win % in NBA History.
Not entirely sure whether this chart is a thing or good or bad . Anyone care to explain it . Is it showing the Spurs have the best winning pct, of all time or am I just a homer ?
https://old.reddit.com/r/dataisbeaut...fs_vs_regular/
This means our regular season win % (roughly 62%) is better than our playoff win % (roughly 55%)
Still great though!
This also means that we still have the #1 regular season win % in NBA History.
Last edited by TDomination; 08-11-2021 at 12:59 PM.
Spurs were in 3rd when Duncan got here, and a combination of that, plus slumps by Boston and the Lakers left us with the best overall RS win %.
Wow I see it now !!! Brain Fart on me . Thank You !!!
If a Laker Phan explains it to you, they may have to borrow some wins from the Byzantine Empire Lakers to fabricate the lead over the Timmy Spurs.
Really cool chart. Most all teams drop in win % because there are no weak teams to pad the %. The few teams that increased their %, no surprise one was the bulls given their stellar playoff runs. Cleveland is a surprise, but then they are an east team. During the regular season they lagged western team win % but then feasted on early eastern conference rounds mounting up wins until they lost in the finals. The same thing could probably be said somewhat for Miami and Detroit. The Warriors improvement being so large is the most surprising to me.
I don't really like seeing both of these on the same chart. A team that finishes 8th and gets swept in the first round (or even loses 4-1 or 4-2) is going to have a worse playoff win% than regular season win%, while a team that doesn't even make the playoffs will have a playoff record of 0-0.
Extrapolating, the teams that "underperform" the most in the playoffs would be those that are consistent early exits, while the ones that "overperform" are teams that are either terrible or le contenders with little in between. The Warriors exemplify that, even if you just look at the last 20 years.
Life isn’t neat and tidy, and how would you have been able to show your conclusions if they weren’t on the same chart?
I don't see the two win percentages (regular season and playoffs) as being directly comparable in an apples-to-apples sense. Yes they use the same units, but they signify very different things.
I guess my problem with using the terms "overperformance" and "underperformance" are the respective positive and negative connotations. The Spurs and Cavs have a similar playoff win%, but much of that is due to the Cavs' 0-0 playoff record in their (many) lottery years having no effect, while it's almost impossible to "overperform" a 65% regular season win rate in the playoffs over any meaningful stretch.
A 14-8 playoff run (12-4 leading up to the Finals and losing the Finals in 6), a great run by any standard, is only a win% of 0.636. Even the elite 2004 and 2006 Spurs teams were barely over 0.500 in those postseasons, which is classified here as "underperformance".
The historical relative strength of the West vs the East also plays a large part and imo makes putting all 30 teams on the same chart even more misleading.
Yeah, the Spurs have a depressed record because they always make the playoffs, even when they're not at their best. Basically all of those green players only made the playoffs during their lightning-in-a-bottle phases, so when they were good, they were great.
The Lakers playoff % is impressive
The numbers are flawed. Cavs misses playoff every year. Which pushes their season percent really low. Then lebron comes gets a le. Then they continue to miss playoff. This gives them a really low season percentage. And those few years they made playoff. They are suddenly high percentage
Data is never inherently flawed, only bad assumptions or analyses based on the data. Data is just data. A depiction of data might result in an inaccurate analysis, or it might not yield any useful information at all. That doesn't make the data flawed, it just makes the specific data visualization technique confusing, misguided, or weak.
The chart is a way to depict that each team has a unique story behind a comparison of their regular season to post season winning %. It is the starting point of a discussion, not an analysis by itself.
It did say overperform and underperform. It implies Cavs play better in playoff. So it is leaning us to a faulty conclusion.
So it's really just semantics saying the data is not flawed. In a sense that it is in fact calculated correctly. But what the chart want us to conclude is straight up misleading.
Just goes to show that the Spurs have historically performed well in the regular season, which is important for any team trying to compete and make the playoffs. Two decades of 50+ win seasons will do that.
Obviously, things get much more difficult in the playoffs. The compe ion level rises significantly especially in the later rounds, teams have more time to scout and make adjustments, and the sample size gets much smaller so percentages will be more volatile.
I know the basis of this data is "overperforms vs underperforms", but the Spurs still have the 3rd highest playoff winning percentage so I'm hard pressed to call that underperforming.
Last edited by Dex; 08-14-2021 at 12:18 PM.
Also a good point. Look at the teams who are in the green as having "overperformed"...the Heat, Bulls, Knicks, Pistons, Warriors, Cavs, Knicks, and Nets.
All teams that have had huge lulls. The Warriors went like 30 years without a le and hardly sniffed the playoffs. It took the Cavs nearly 50 years to win a le and most of their runs came with LeBron.
Bulls have been awful since Jordan left, and the Knicks have become the joke of the NBA.
Heat, Bulls, Nets....they all had a couple good runs with some star talent but have otherwise been poor regular season teams for a long time...and the Nets are just now coming back to prominence with their big three.
The percentages easily get skewed when the only time you've made the playoffs is when you have a superteam.
Having Gervin,Robinson,Duncan over a 40 year period was really helpful.
You make a fair point about the overperformed/underperformed label. And a better chart would report the regular season winning % for only the years the respective team made the playoffs. Normalizing winning % based on playoff seeding could also be done. A three dimensional chart using (or simple weighting) playoff frequency might also be neat. But it is more than semantics to say the data is flawed vs critiquing the visualization technique. But I have been an empiricist and data modeler, so I understand the distinction is more clear cut for me than most.
Well, data can be called flawed when it proves unsuitable for the purpose for which it is used. Not to quibble.
There’s an obvious problem with the graph that I don’t know if anybody has mentioned. It begins the comparison in 1946, which implies all the listed teams existed in 1946. That is factually incorrect, of course.
A better comparison would cover only the period when all the listed teams exist. For example, one could look at the period since the ABA merger, until now, and list only the teams that existed at the time of the merger (and that still exist.)
The Charlotte franchise began in 2004. The graph implies Charlotte had an opportunity to win playoff games in 1947. Is what I’m talking about.
Fun stuff to look at, but ultimately not too meaningful... what the Bucks did in 1978 with Don Nelson as their coach and Marques Johnson their best player has zero influence or predictive power on what anything Giannis & co will do in 2022. That being said, it's pretty amazing how consistently bad the Timberwolves have been-- wow.
yeah they're dumb.
it's sports. the graphic is fun.
it makes the spurs look good.
enjoy it while it lasts ...
A bunch of lottery years would reduce the Spurs' "underperformance", silver lining?enjoy it while it lasts ...
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