NBA 2020 Redux - The Seasonette

The Suns go 8-0 in the bubble, and don’t make the playoffs. Whatever they figured out during the break, hope they can remember it next season.

Chances are they won’t. The organization will trade anybody good.

Very strange. Wonder why the Suns played so well with so little to gain. I only saw one of their games in the bubble.

The Raptors sometimes started slow, but looked good in most of the games save Boston. They had the best defence, according to some metric at 538, in the league by far. But they get odd respect - the new system gives them a 2% chance of repeating, the old system 31%. Neither of those seems right, even though I’d love to see them win again. Maybe @RickJay has more answers. They start out against a hot Nets squad.

If Portland had lost, the Suns would have made the playoffs.

Who knows, they might have actually done something post season for a change!

Here’s an amusing article about a not-so-obvious challenge of the NBA bubble games: censoring the audio during live games when there’s no live crowd noise to mask the profanities.

I suppose both the Suns motivation and the problem of swearing players should be obvious but I didn’t think about either of them.

Gutsy (and let’s face it, lucky) win by Portland tonight. Four of the eight players in the lineup finished with 5 fouls.

Is anyone rooting for the Lakers besides actual Laker fans? I’m obviously biased, but the Blazers are just so likeable.

They absolutely destroyed the Nets in Game 1. The Nets are a plucky bunch but they just have so many guys out. They’re just not good enough to go far. That team has a lot of moxie but they have too many guys who aren’t available.

The 538 system just baffles me; I’m sorry, I don’t know that I can provide insight. The one system, the one that gives the Raptors a 3% chance now, appears to be based on adding up how they project the future performance of individual players, not actual team performance. For most of the season that system -called, ironically, RAPTOR - thought the Sixers were, by far, the best team in the NBA, even though nothing actually occurring in games would suggest that was the case. Now that Ben Simmons is gone, RAPTOR has dropped the Sixers.

The other system is based on team performance, and hugely favors Toronto. ELO, as that system is called, is very high on the Eastern Conference, giving Toronto, Boston and Milwaukee a combined 62% chance of one of team ending up champion.

I’m a Raptors fan so take this with a grain of salt, but; it seems obvious to me the Raptors are the best team in the NBA. They are fully healthy now, and they were winning 70 percent of the time when they weren’t healthy. They are an absolute machine, incredibly deep, do everything well, have the best coach in the NBA, and obviously have reason to play with confidence. It seems amazing to say that AFTER KAwhi left, but it’s true; they gained elsewhere. Fred VV has elevated his game to All Star levels, Pascal can explode on any given night, Serge Ibaka is playing the best basketball of his life, and every night Nurse uses someone like Chris Boucher or Norm Powell to come in and score 19 points in fifteen minutes. To my view ELO is bang on. They have roughly a 1/3 shot of winning it all.

I mean, maybe they’re onto something with RAPTOR, I dunno. Only time will tell, I guess, to see if it correctly predicts many postseason results.

If I may expand on this.

RAPTOR is basically a set of learning algorithms. What it does is it looks at the entire history of the NBA, and compares players to allthe other players in league history, and attempts to project, based on the player’s similarity to other players (and adjusting for differences in how the game was played, etc etc) how the player will perform in the future. So, it’ll look at Alec Burks, and compare him with all the other players there ever were, especially the ones who were a lot like Alec Burks; 28 years old, 6-6 shooting guards, who had statistical similarities to Burks. From there, it takes what those players did after this exact point in their careers, and constructs what Burks is likely to do based on the theory that what he’s likely to do is very much like that Alec Burksish players did in the case.

This is - like almost all advanced statistical analyses in sports - an idea borrowed from baseball. They’ve been doing this in baseball for a long time; Bill James was doing this with Excel spreadsheets back in the 80s. Baseball Reference uses a system called PECOTA.

The obvious weakness of a basketball system, versus baseball, in expanding these projections into team performance is that in basketball, team performance is a gestalt thing to an extent it is not in baseball. In baseball, if you have a player like Mike Trout who bats .300 with 40 homers a year playing great defense, he will very likely do the same thing next year no matter what team he’s on. If you go out and acquire another great player, or lose a great player, that will have no real effect on Mike Trout. Baseball players perform alone; Mike Trout hits a home run or strikes out on his own merits. Basketball teams interact; a player who performs well in one system may not perform well in another.

Now, I haven’t seen the underlying formulas of RAPTOR and I don’t know if there’s much proof it works, but it seems likely to me that the Toronto Raptors and Philadelphia 76ers are extreme cases of the system’s weakness. Especially the Sixers. RAPTOR has claimed the Sixers were literally one of the best teams in the history of basketball since the beginning of the season, but nothing that happened on the floor supported that. Not that they’re a bad team, they’re a good team, but I cannot take seriously the idea that they were anywhere near the best team in the league. (ELO rating, which basically just looks at team performance, point differential, and strength of schedule, feels they were the 8th best team in the league this year, which seems fair.)

Conversely, RAPTOR feels the Raptors are only the eighth best team in the league - worse than the Nuggets, for God’s sake - which is bananas.

The overfocus on star players is a bug and not a feature. The NBA has obviously some very talented stars who make assists and baskets. A good team can full court press a star with two players, and reduce their efficacy. This does not usually happen because there are too many other decent players on the team to fill those defensive holes.

It’s been fairly obvious to Raptor fans the ELO seems closer to what is observed. With the exception of Boston and a few slow starts, Toronto looks like they are already playing championship level ball. I wish it was easy and legal to put money on them since they are going to win again this year. (Maybe it is, I know little about this stuff.)

One game means nothing, but the losses of the Bucks, Clippers and Lakers in the bubble will surprise many. The Nets played some good games but they just do not have the depth of Toronto.

Because any star can have a mediocre night. Toronto played well with injured stars - if Lowry or Anunoby aren’t doing it (and Fred VanVleet always does; even Anunoby has improved a lot this season and sometimes shone), maybe Powell or Hollis-Jefferson or Ibaka or other players will step up. The stats do not seem to capture the quality that the Raptors B team often plays at an A level when they have to.

Because if you look at the top 50 players in any major stat (rebounds, baskets, etc), Toronto seems to have one guy who is 20th in the league and one guy who is 30th - no one at the very top. Except Fred VanVleet being 5th in steals - he’s my favourite; so quick, a great guard, an impressive 3 throw guy. He looked like Curry first game vs. The Nets.

My (completely non-expert) take is that the Raptors are just extremely consistent. If you’re comparing each team’s best possible performance, then the Raps are maybe 5th or something, but they play nearly that well all the time. Maybe the Lakers (for example) at their best are better, but that’s a rare performance, and their average game might be below Toronto’s average game.

Well, take today’s game. They were quickly down 10 points to the Nets. It took them a long time to tie it up. Their A team was okay but missing a lot of shots.

Nick Nurse put together a line with Norman Powell. During the regular season, that particular bunch of guys had played two minutes together. But it worked. Powell, a benchwarmer last season, scored 32 points and turned the team around. Next game, that could be any of eight other guys.

The Raptors are consistent, don’t give up easily, but can be energized by anyone. None of the players are the very best in the league. I hope Toronto can afford to keep them.

I don’t buy that other teams have much greater optimal performances. The Lakers are a good team, but they’ve lost their last twelve games to Toronto. Just how often do these best possible performances occur?

Someone released the video of Masai Ujiri being accosted by an officer after last years NBA final. It’s pretty ridiculous, especially given subsequent claims. They must have known this would happen?

Raptors continuing to amaze. I can’t see anyone beating them, but of course if you have an 80% chance of winning each of four series, that equals a 40% chance.

Warriors finally apologize to Ujiri.

Trail Blazers looking darn impressive.

Raptors must have set a playoff record with 100 bench points while sweeping the Nets. They’ll have a much harder time against Boston. Fortunately, there should be lots of time for Lowry to rest the ankle he injured in the first quarter.

ESPN says the 100 bench points is the most ever, playoffs or regular season, since the stat was first kept in 1970. So they’re certainty continuing to prove their depth.

Do you know what the old record was? Curious, couldn’t see it on a quick google.

The old records were 94 in the season, 86 in the playoffs.

The Raptors are playiong a little coy with Lowry’s condition. That is bad.

Everyone gets all pumped about Fred and Spicy P, but Kyle Lowry is the best player the Raptors have, and losing him turns them from being a favourite against Boston to being a slight underdog.

It’s a loss. But it didn’t seem like a bad fall and he was playing soon afterward. A Grade 1 sprain is unpredictable but I doubt he’ll be out long.

The series against Boston will be hard but if they win I can’t see anyone else beating them.

Milwaukee or either LA team COULD beat them. I’d bet on the Raptors but I wouldn’t bet anything that would really hurt to lose.

When you’re up against a guy like Giannis, LeBron, or Kawhi, those guys can steal four games in seven.