Kyle Korver ruled out for rest of playoffs
May 23, 2015Cavs vs. Hawks Game 3: Behind the Box Score
May 25, 2015A few weeks ago, I used 31 NBA postseasons worth of data to test the clichéd hypothesis that prior playoff experience is important to success in the NBA playoffs. I asked the questions, “Does playoff experience matter?,” “How much does it matter?,” “Is playoff experience the only thing that matters?” and, “While we’re at it, does anything really matter?” My experiment yielded the answers, “Yes,” “An ambiguously significant amount,” “No, things like ‘playoff seed,’ ‘talent,’ and ‘if I’m wearing my lucky underpants’ matter, but maybe we should revisit this idea later,” and, “Hey, Don Draper, cool it with the big-picture existential junkets whydon’tya?”
To spare you the agony of reading or rereading the original, the results can be summarized as follows.
[M]y primary conclusion is that more Team XP (the name I gave the metric for the total playoff experience of a team’s players) is a nearly universal positive in head-to-head matchups. The more experienced [NBA] playoff team wins nearly two-thirds of the time in head-to-head matchups, and significantly more experienced teams win at an even higher rate than that. A significant amount of playoff experience is a preferred qualification for winning the Finals (a team should aim for about 15,000 minutes), and it’s prudent to have upwards of 7 Seasoned Veterans on your roster if you want to win a championship, with 5 Seasoned Veterans as an absolute minimum. In fact, an increased Team XP only improves a team’s chance of success in the playoffs up until as high as the 28,000-30,000 minute mark.
As for this season’s Cleveland Cavaliers, the lack of previous playoff experience for players like Love, Irving, and Thompson is a serious concern, and a huge liability against a team like the [San Antonio] Spurs. A lot of the Cavs playoff experience is on its bench. But the seemingly minor acquisitions of Shawn Marion, James Jones, Mike Miller, Kendrick Perkins, and even J.R. Smith, may have provided enough playoff experience on the Cavs roster to swing a playoff series or two. Summarily, the Cavs are probably one of the few teams with the right combo of talent and experience to win a title.
Because there were a lot of questions from readers (okay, more like three) about other things that influence success in the playoffs, and because they were questions shared by my own meddlesome curiosity, I thought it would be a worthwhile exercise to revisit playoff experience as it relates to the 2015 NBA Playoffs thus far, the Cleveland Cavaliers, and the other factors that may invite playoff success.
How have the more experienced teams fared in the playoffs so far?
Well, before we go on another caffeine-induced Microsoft Excel odyssey into the other factors, let’s see if the 2015 playoffs have borne out the results predicted by prior playoff experience. From a pure win-loss perspective, it’s been a mediocre start for veteran savviness — the more experienced team has only won six of the 12 total head-to-head playoff matchups thus far. This .500 record isn’t a wild departure from the 65.2 win percentage of more experienced teams from 1984 to 2014, but it doesn’t make me look as smart as an 8-4 record would.1
Even though more experienced teams are slightly under-performing thus far, the playoffs have mostly conformed to expectations. Last time, I used a chart categorizing teams based on their Team XP and their regular season win totals to group the championship candidates.2 This chart is shown again below, with the since-terminated teams X’ed out to memorialize their grisly demise.3
You’ll notice that the teams marked as either too bad or too inexperienced to realistically hope for a championship were unable to overcome their badness or inexperiencedness, and were unceremoniously dispatched. (Some of these teams were borderline teams that didn’t even qualify for the playoffs. Everyone at home mime a lonely tear rolling down your cheek for poor Pat Riley.) The two untested playoff teams that had superlative regular seasons — the Golden State Warriors and Atlanta Hawks — both made the conference finals. The other surviving teams — the Cleveland Cavaliers and Houston Rockets — both fit the “championship profile,” teams with the skills and work experience typical of a champion’s resumé.
The most interesting deceased team is the San Antonio Spurs, whose Team XP of 31,206 minutes of collective prior playoff experience made them only the third team to enter the playoffs with a Team XP exceeding 30,000 minutes, trailing only the 2013-14 Miami Heat as the most experienced team ever. The rate of success for experienced teams only increases until beyond the 25,000 minute mark.4
But I speculated that about 30,000 minutes played may be too much wear-and-tear — the positive effects of playoff experience would cease to overcome the debilitating physical effects of excessive game action. Well the Spurs lost, meaning that contenders with a Team XP over 30,000 minutes are now 0-for-4 in their title quests. This could either be a meaningless small sample, the result of an anomaly where a 56-win Los Angeles Clippers team played a 55-win San Antonio Spurs team in the first round with homecourt advantage, or mounting evidence that playoff experience can eventually become a detriment to a team after too many games. In any event, grouping teams based on regular season success and playoff experience appears to be a valuable exercise.
Are we sure the success of experienced playoff teams isn’t just a result of them being ‘better’?
The last foray into this topic produced two inarguable results: (( Well, more than two, but two important ones for the sake of this paragraph. Actually, add this very paragraph to the list of inarguable results. )) 1. The more experienced playoff teams win head-to-head matchups much more than the less experienced teams; and 2. The greater the gap in experience, the greater the likelihood of success for the more experienced team. But did I mistake correlation with causation? Are more experienced teams simply the higher-seeded, better, more talented teams? And their advantage in experience is incidental to them taking advantage of worse teams?
To prod this theory, I examined the series win-loss records of teams possessing four different advantages, two experience-related and two related to regular season success: 1. Greater Team XP; 2. More Seasoned Veterans (the number of players possessing over 500 minutes of prior playoff experience); 3. Home court advantage;5 and 4. More regular season wins. Of these, collective prior playoff experience is the worst predictor of success. I should add that this isn’t very surprising. I would expect higher-seeded teams and teams with more regular season wins to win at a much higher rate than teams who have simply been to the playoffs more. And they do.
Simply picking the team with more regular season wins has been a sound choice a whopping 78.2 percent of the time. So, just pick the team that was better in the regular season then. Right? Hawks in six and Warriors in four. Done — let’s down these beers, pack up the car, and try to beat the traffic out of here.
Well, just looking at the win-loss record doesn’t tell the whole story. A lot of average teams have a lot of playoff experience. And a lot of mildly inexperienced teams are relatively dominant. How do similarly disadvantaged teams handle their deficiencies depending on experience?
In any given playoff matchup, a team can only be one four of things: a favorite that’s more experienced than its opponent; a favorite that’s less experienced than its opponent, an underdog that’s more experienced than its opponent, or an underdog that’s less experienced than its opponent.6 When we look at the 477 head-to-head playoff matchups in the NBA dating back to the 1983-84 season, we find that more experienced teams are much more likely to pull an upset: more experienced teams beat higher-seeded opponents nearly 40 percent of the time, 17.4 percent more frequently than teams with less experience than their competition. The inverse is true by default in this case: more experienced teams are less likely to be upset.
So, while regular season success (as a proxy for talent) is much more important when predicting playoff success, we still find that prior playoff experience is very important: more experienced teams are nearly twice as likely to succeed in an upset bid.
Is this any more useful than the generic ‘experience is a good thing’? And what about the the rest of the playoffs and our beloved Cleveland Cavaliers?
Of course, not all underdogs are alike. Dogs come in all shapes in colors: some are big and some are small; some are brown and some are white with spots; some are obedient and well-behaved, and others piss on the carpet, dig through the trash, and eat not one but two sets of your headphones, even after you put them in your laptop bag and zipped it up, thinking there’s no way it could be opened to get the headphones without a pair of thumbs and some serious problem-solving skills.7
But the point is that while more experienced underdogs are twice as likely to pull an upset as less experienced ones, some are more qualified than others. The chart below shows the win percentage of underdogs and favorites of all shapes and sizes. The teams toward the upper left have less playoff experience and less regular season success, and the teams in the lower right have more playoff experience and more regular season success. There’s a lot of green at the bottom, but you’ll notice the green gets greener and the red gets yellower as you move to the right. This is because more experienced teams are much more capable underdogs (and favorites) than less experienced ones. Teams with fewer regular season wins are seriously disadvantaged; but much less so than their inexperienced counterparts.
I’ve doodled on chart to show where the Cleveland Cavaliers and Houston Rockets were entering the series. (Believe it or not, the annotations are better than my actual handwriting.) The Cavs went 53-29 in the regular season, and had seven wins fewer than the Atlanta Hawks at 60. Sixty wins is a lot; hence why it would be quite a coup if the Cavs could prevail. However, the Cavs have a Team XP of 18,744, 11,171 minutes more than the Atlanta Hawks at 7573 minutes. That’s a substantial experiential edge.
Teams similarly situated to the Cavs are 3-5 in head-to-head playoff matchups, so it’s a rare set of circumstances (that’s eight teams out of 954) and unfavorable for the Cavs. But look at the alternative. Had the Cavs only been slightly more experienced, that win percentage drops from 37.5 to 21.9, and down to 18.8 had the Cavs been slightly less experienced. That’s between a 15 and 18 percent swing based on experience — quite a difference.
Meanwhile in the Western Conference Finals, teams entering a series like the Houston Rockets have a 21.4 percent chance of winning. Now that the Warriors took a 3-0 series lead on Saturday night with an utter annihilation of the Rockets behind Stephen Curry’s 40 points, the Rockets chances of winning are virtually nonexistent. If the Cavs are able to hold onto their 2-0 series lead now that Kyle Korver is out for the Hawks for the remainder of the playoffs [knocking on every available wooden surface in my apartment, praying to the gods of every major world religion, and committing three random good deeds to generate good karma], they would be serious underdogs against the Golden State Warriors.
Using the categories in the chart, the Cavs would have only a 1-in-5 chance of beating the 67-win Warriors.8 But that probability is still twice that that of a team that’s slightly less experienced than its opponent, and the Cavs’ 1-in-5 chance against a team like the Warriors is more favorable than the 18-180 record of teams without the Cavs significant experiential advantage.
Conclusion
No matter how you look at, playoff experience is a significant factor in head-to-head success in the playoffs. Sure, it’s not as important as talent or regular season success, but it’s still immensely valuable. Underdogs that have an advantage in experience are nearly twice as likely to pull off an upset (according to seed). Crude approximations show that 5000 playoff minutes in additional collective playoff experience are worth about 1-3 regular season wins. I would never argue that Team XP is a magical metric that should replace margin of victory, regular season wins, or net rating — but it’s another tool in the shed with which to evaluate playoff teams, to quantify an intangible, and to determine one of the innumerable assets LeBron James contributes to a team’s portfolio.
Prior to Game 1 of the series, Shaquille O’Neal said in his prediction on TNT’s pregame show that he was picking the Cavaliers because the Hawks had “never been there before,” meaning to the Eastern Conference Finals. Maybe Atlanta’s play so far is a symptom of that. If the Cavs are fortunate enough to face the Warriors in the Finals, their collective experience9 and the presence of LeBron James will be viewed as their only distinct advantages. This narrative on experience will shape not only how we feel about the playoffs going forward, but also the outcome — and if the Cavs are miraculously win a championship, we may be looking at it as the decisive factor in their victory.
- As usual, all of this data is courtesy the immensely and eternally valuable Basketball-Reference.com. [↩]
- Again, Team XP is a made-up metric that represents a team’s cumulative collective prior playoff experience, measured in minutes played. The greater the number, the more experienced the team. [↩]
- The first piece ran before the end of the regular season, so some teams won another game or two. The Team XP’s have also changed as I updated them to include the prior experience of players who had played in the playoffs through May 21 — this was beneficial for the Cavs because of Shawn Marion’s experience, as he didn’t qualify the last time around. [↩]
- Meaning that teams with 25k-30k minutes win head-to-head matchups and championships at a higher rate than teams with 20k-25k minutes, who win head-to-head matchups and championships at a higher rate … you get the point. There’s a table here. [↩]
- One could also classify this as “having a higher seed,” where a lower number means a higher seed — which I understand is confusing, but I don’t make the rules I just complain about them. [↩]
- I’m using favorite/underdog in this context based on seed — the higher-seeded team is the “favorite,” and the lower-seeded team is the “underdog.” For example, the Cavs are the nominal underdog in the series against the Hawks. I know lower-seeded teams are often favored in Vegas — including the Cavs entering the Eastern Conference Finals — but I used the shorthands for convenience. These figures don’t include the 26 teams from the 13 Finals that involved teams with the same conference seed, such as what would happen if the Warriors played the Hawks in the Finals. [↩]
- Yeah, Manny, I’m talking about you. Bad dog. [↩]
- We have a small sample size here, as this .200 win percentage is literally based on one team out of five winning with more than 9 wins fewer than its opponent and more than 10,000 minutes of additional playoff experience. [↩]
- Which is primarily LeBron’s, but that’s besides the point. [↩]
4 Comments
LeBron is beating the Hawks with his mind as much as his body. One can sense that he has figured them out and is taking them apart. Let’s hope Kyrie can get some rest and be effective if we make it to the finals against GS. However, I now have confidence that LeBron may even be able to overcome this obstacle. By the way, shouldn’t teams be beating Curry up by constantly setting picks on him? By the 4th quarter he would be worn down, which would affect his shot. He may be in great shape, but his slight build should be taken advantage of.
The current Cavaliers are doing to teams what used to be done to them and that’s physical, hard nosed, rebounding, defense and just overall team chemistry on and off the court. I’m loving it.
As far as Golden State and Curry go only Memphis really played any defense against him and even then it wasn’t to the regular season Memphis standard with Tony Allen being banged up. You make a great point in Curry not having to work both ends. If the Warriors and Cavaliers meet I’m looking forward to seeing Shumpert guard Curry. The other end will be the huge question mark. This is why despite KI working out with a new brace no way do I play him game three tonight vs Atlanta. In fact the only way he MIGHT play is if the series gets tied 2-2 and heads back to Atlanta. Given the way the Cavaliers are playing I cannot imagine Atlanta coming into The Q and winning both games. But lets start with tonight’s game three.
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Interesting stuff Kyle, thanks for doing all this work. To look at your data in a slightly different (more Cavs-homer-ish way), I went back and looked at the last 42 games of the season (after the Cavs roster was assembled as it currently stands) and it makes what’s happening more in line with your trends.
The Cavs finished their first 39 games (19-20) on January 13. They won 34 games since then.
The Hawks finished their first 39 games on January 14. They won 29 games since then.
The Warriors finished their first 39 games on January 19. They won 34 games since then.
Going back to your heat map, that pushes the Cavs from a 37.5% chance of beating Atlanta to a 69.2% chance. And also pushes the chance of beating Golden State up to 60%, if I read that correctly (>10,000 XP and -4 to 0 game difference in record).
Maybe not all doom and gloom?