Déjà Broom: 4 Years, 9 Tiger Sweeps, 15 Tribe Reactions
April 13, 2015Cavaliers playoff tickets sell out in minutes
April 13, 2015Although it feels unfamiliar after a four-season hiatus, Cleveland Cavalier fans are starting to see players at home and across the NBA start to limber up their playoff bodies. LeBron James starts to post up more at the expense of some of his more ill-advised three-point heaves; Dwyane Wade mulls more bizarre and experimental Dr. Frankenstein-like treatments on his bad knees; San Antonio Spurs Playoff Specialist Boris Diaw cuts the third eclair out of his second breakfast.
But while players prepare their bodies for the Thunderdome that is the playoffs, broadcasters and journalists sharpen their wits, vocabularies, and phraseologies as much as they can. For some, this doesn’t mean much. Mostly, it means that they go to the reliable cliché rolodex that much more often. Expect mostly the same broadcasts in the playoffs, but with a few extra doses of “grit” and “toughness,” a barrage of “they’ve been here before”s, and an IV drip of “hustle” for “battle-tested veterans.” The playoffs: where the guy who “wanted it more” always wins.1 Before long, you’ll think playoff stalwarts like Paul Pierce and Tony Parker have spent the last decade taking potato mashers in the same foxholes as decorated veterans in some war of liberation for oppressed peoples.
A lot of this cliché-spouting is based on one unproven and widely held but taken-for-granted truth: Playoff experience is important.
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We want to believe in the value of enduring through trials and tribulations.
We want to believe in the value of enduring through trials and tribulations. No one wants to hear the tale of how “Odysseus made it home to Ithaca, and it wasn’t really all that hard, either.” That’s not epic at all! We want confirmation that things actually matter, and that the journey is meaningful, so we pretend that sports do that.
As far as the NBA goes, LeBron James was a victim of the “experience matters” narrative throughout his career … until he won a championship.2 Michael Jordan similarly struggled with the stigma of inexperience until he “learned” how to win a championship. Even if these victories were more attributable to James joining a team with better players or the decline of the Detroit Pistons, who tormented Jordan throughout his early career, these examples affirmed our worldview.
A running plot line throughout this Cavs season has been that the team’s “Big Three” — consisting of LeBron James, Kyrie Irving, and Kevin Love — has two players who have never played in a playoff game in their entire careers. When the Cavs were in discussions to acquire Love in the summer, nearly every article and post about the Cavs both before and after the trade alluded to the new-look Cavs’ perceived lack of playoff experience, and speculated on how it affected their title odds.
At the time, LeBron James and Anderson Varejao were the only two prospective Cavs starters to have any playoff experience. It’s April now, and decorated players Kyrie Irving and Kevin Love still have zero playoff experience in their combined eleven seasons in the NBA. Because Irving and Love had never made the playoffs, that will make them “green” and “inexperienced” novices, error-prone and vulnerable once the playoffs begin this weekend. Fans will hear comments on their lack of experience somewhere between 100 and 5000 times over the course of the playoffs, depending on how well they perform. Should either of them make a turnover or miss a shot at an inopportune time (which they will, because that happens during basketball games), it will be implied that they’ve forgotten how to basketball and temporarily lost control of bladder function under the pressure of playoff scrutiny.
But, will the Cavs as a team actually suffer because of a lack of playoff experience? And does prior playoff experience even matter to begin with?
PO XP: Measuring the Immeasurable
Godless stat dorks like myself often discount intangibles in favor of our precious numbers,3 but even I can see the folly in underrating the spiritual or psychological component of roster construction. But let’s do the best we can, because I want to know how much know-how a Kendrick Perkins adds to a team; how many gray hairs are contributed by a Shawn Marion. If a veteran is bringing a valuable asset to a team in the form of his playoff experience, the amount of playoff experience each player adds should be accounted for when evaluating the team — no different than points, rebounds, or steals.4
To quantify playoff experience, I used the the eternally valuable Basketball-Reference.com to compile the previous playoff minutes played by each player on every NBA playoff team since the 1983-84 season, totaling 31 seasons worth of data for 496 teams. In the spirit of the delightfully sarcastic Barkley, Shut and Jam Gaiden,5 I labeled the metric Team XP, which sounds like an attribute in a turn-based RPG, but is simply shorthand for a team’s collective, cumulative playoff experience (in minutes played).6 Regular season minutes were unaccounted for (you know, because “the playoffs blah blah are a different season something something”). The greater the Team XP, the more battle-tested and veteran-laden the team.7
Additionally, I calculated each team’s number of “seasoned veterans” (SVs), a favorite term of analysts and broadcasters alike in which the “seasoned” is meant to connote a player with valuable postseason experience, not KFC’s Original Recipe chicken. A player becomes a “seasoned” veteran after playoff experience from years past sears the pain, toughness, and grit demanded of playoff basketball into his flesh. A player qualifies for seasoned status when his individual XP exceeds 480 minutes played, a number that isn’t totally arbitrary.8 Just as a sample, this is what last season’s playoff rosters looked like in Team XP and SVs. You’ll notice that the two most experienced teams had the most success in 2013-14.
So, Team XP and SVs are two obvious and straightforward ways to measure the amount of “veteran postseason leadership” on a team, but are they at all useful?
Prior Experience Is a Strong Indicator of Success in Head-to-Head Playoff Matchups
The initial results were only mildly informative. First, I plotted each playoff team’s win percentage versus their Team XP. There is a clear correlation, as demonstrated by the linear trendline on the graph below, but it’s not a strong one. Other plots (not shown) reveal the same thing is true for playoff win percentage versus SVs, playoff wins versus PO XP, and playoff wins versus SVs. In all cases there is a clear relationship between prior playoff experience and playoff success, but not a particularly strong one that’s helpful for forecasting wins or performance in the playoffs.9
In order obtain to more useful results, we need to look at the head-to-head matchups over the course of the playoffs and Finals to see if a disparity in playoff experience matters. Only then can we put prior playoff experience in a useful historical context and discern whether it’s useful for predicting success.
Examining the results from 496 team-seasons and 465 head-to-head matchups, the more experienced team (the team with the greater Team XP) won 303 of those 465 series, for a whopping win percentage of .652. So, nearly two-thirds of all playoff series are won by the more experienced team. Similarly, the team with a greater SVs won .697 percent of playoff series.10
An edge in Team XP and SVs seems to have an impact regardless of scenario. In the NBA Finals, when you would expect the effects of experience to be magnified, the more experienced team is 22-9 (.710 win percentage). A team that is significantly more experienced than its opponent (its Team XP exceeds its opponents by more than 10,000 minutes played) wins 78.5 percent of the time in any playoff matchup (at 135-37) and 72.7 percent of the time in the Finals (at 8-3). So, it appears that playoff experience’s impact increases as the games grow in importance, and as the gap in experience between the two teams becomes wider.
There Is a Playoff-Experience Profile for NBA Championship Teams
The average NBA Champion has a Team XP of nearly 18,000 minutes, which would place the average champion in the 86th percentile of prior playoff experience for qualifying teams since 1983-84.11 In other words, the typical NBA Finals winner is one of the three or four most experienced teams in any postseason. The average championship roster has 7.84 seasoned veterans, placing it in the 81st percentile of playoff teams since 1983-84. Again, this is experience of teams’ players entering the season, not accounting for experience accrued on the way to the Finals.
No team has ever won the NBA Finals with less than 5 seasoned veterans.12 No team has ever won the title with a Team XP of less than 5000, which is about 21 games of collective prior playoff experience if a previously inexperienced team remains completely intact. Only two teams have won the title with between 5000 and 10,000 minutes.13 The bar graph below summarizes these results, showing the number of NBA Champs by SVs (the number of active seasoned veterans on a roster).
The 2012-13 Miami Heat have the distinction as the only team with an SVs of 12 — they won the title. Miami had 11 Seasoned Veterans in 2013-2014, but based on how the 2014 Finals played out, I have doubts that Mike Miller would have spared the Heat from the merciless beat down the San Antonio Spurs inflicted on the Heat; but we can only speculate. The Spurs were no slouch with 9 Seasoned Veterans of their own.
To add some historical context, the less experienced team surprisingly went 1-2 in the mid-80s Finals matchups between Magic Johnson’s Los Angeles Lakers and Larry Bird’s Boston Celtics.14 However, their Team XPs were only separated by an average of an insignificant eight percent, even with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar padding the Lakers’ Team XP with thousands of playoff minutes.
In the ensuing era, Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls had to accumulate over 11,000 playoff minutes before they were able to conquer the battle-weary Pistons of the 1980s that had eliminated them the three preceding years. Jordan’s Bulls dynasty went 6-0 in the Finals, and had the greater Team XP in every Finals but the first, versus the 1990-91 Lakers whose own dynasty was dwindling down.
Maybe the greatest piece of evidence that playoff experience is an unmitigated good is the rate at which the most veteran-laden teams win the Finals. The success rate of teams increases with each sub-category of increasing Team XP.15 As stated above, zero teams have won the Finals with less than 5000 minutes of prior experience entering the playoffs, despite 157 such team attempts. This compares unfavorably with a success rate of 40.0 percent for teams whose Team XP is between 25,000 and 30,000 minutes, as shown below.16
Is there a point where teams become “too old”; where experience turns from ordinary wear-and-tear to bodily abuse? That’s unclear. There are only two teams in the sample whose Team XP exceeded 30,000 minutes (the 2013-14 Heat and 2007-08 Spurs), and both failed to win the NBA Finals. That may be too small a sample size, or it might be indicative of the negative effects of physical deterioration after players have participated in over 100 playoff games. It’s worth noting that despite the uninterrupted presence of Tim Duncan, Manu Ginobili, and Tony Parker in the playoffs, the Spurs reinvented themselves to go below 30,000 playoff minutes from 2008 until this season. If there is such a point where team playoff experience becomes a burden and not a boost, it may be as high as 28,000-30,000 minutes.
But even if people smarter than myself ultimately conclude that playoff experience is immaterial in deciding who’s victorious in each playoff series, there’s no denying that there is a stereotypical NBA champion. Just like every Dave Matthews band fan seems to be a young 30s male who wears cargo shorts with flip-flops, NBA champions tend to have have between 15,000 and 30,000 minutes of previous playoff experience, and seven or more seasoned veterans. Teams outside of this “championship profile” have an uphill battle, and are fighting longer odds.
Is All This Science Reflected in the Cavs Roster?
As hinted at above, there are certain threshold numbers a general manager and team should aspire toward. A well-constructed roster will have a Team XP of over 15,000-16,000 minutes and at least seven seasoned veterans — if competing for a championship is the goal, anyway.
On July 12, 2014, LeBron James signed with the Cleveland Cavaliers in a not-so-covert transaction. By the time the dust settled, there were only two other players on the roster who had seen any postseason action: Anderson Varejao and Brendan Haywood.17 Between James’ massive 6717 playoff-minute figure, Varejao’s 1600 minute total, and Haywood’s 1138, the Cavs’ cumulative playoff experience at that time was only 9455 minutes played. A Team XP of under 10,000 is woefully inadequate for making a championship run, even with a great player like Kevin Love. Only two out of 150 teams with a Team XP between 5000 and 10,000 have won the NBA Finals.
After signing of James, the Cavs began to gobble up former confederates of LeBron’s in Miami to accumulate playoff minutes. The Cavs signed James Jones and Mike Miller on August 5, who have 3073 playoff minutes between them. Shawn Marion joined the team two-and-a-half weeks after the Kevin Love trade concluded, bringing another several thousand playoff minutes with him. Suddenly, the Cavs’ Team XP was 16,725 minutes; meeting the 15,000 minute threshold to make a title run.18
But GM David Griffin wasn’t finished. The Cavs had a well-documented slow start, then spiritual team leader Anderson Varejao (and his 1600 playoff minutes) were lost for the season to a knee injury. With the teem reeling, Griffin nimbly scavenged for some more pieces that not only stopped the Cavs’ free fall, but boosted the Cavs’ Team XP to a respectable level, trading for Iman Shumpert, JR Smith, and Timofey Mozgov in December. The signing of Kendrick Perkins in late February added more than a great scowl and a world-class traveler to the bench, but another indispensable veteran presence. Griffin’s moves solidified the Cavs’ Team XP at 18,744 and its SVs at six, which are figures barely high enough to compete for a championship (if history is any indicator).19
Summarily, Team XP is just another objective stat to help teams build a roster; an attempt to put a quantitative value on an intangible. Team playoff experience is something that many NBA teams may already use and someone like LeBron James may consciously consider when debating internally who should be a part of the roster, or with which team he should sign. Maybe when James was weighing the pros and cons of coming to Cleveland last summer, he viewed a youthful roster that could grow with him in the latter half of his career and a handful of veterans as a more attractive alternative than a Miami Heat roster with over 25,000 playoff minutes and not enough young players to carry the burden. Maybe when David Griffin was looking to transform the Cavs roster, he saw JR Smith’s 1351 playoff minutes as well as the 10.9 points per game as valuable additions to the Cavs. Maybe David Griffin went overboard accumulating playoff experience in the offseason, when younger, less creaky contributors were available.
When looking at all the usual considerations a GM has when assembling a team, such as scoring and rebounding, playoff experience is merely another one. The decisions of GM David Griffin and LeBron James over the last several months reflect this line of thinking.
How Does the Cavs’ Cumulative Playoff Experience Impact Their Title Chances?
The Cavs’ Team XP of 18,744 minutes played is greater than both the average and median NBA champion’s Team XP. Another 5000 minutes of playoff experience would be ideal, but playoff games don’t grow on trees — even if the hardwood they’re played on does. But the Cavs are still one of the better-prepared teams in the playoffs. The Cavs have the third most playoff minutes of prospective 2015 playoff teams, as shown in the table below.
The Cavs narrowly trail the Dallas Mavericks in total playoff experience, but are well behind the Spurs, who boast an overwhelming Team XP of 30,860. The Spurs — who have showcased several different versions of teams around Tim Duncan since the first of their 18 consecutive playoff seasons in 1997-98 — have been in the playoffs since Kyrie Irving was losing his baby teeth and blowing bubbles in his chocolate milk during school lunch.20 There’s no doubt the Cavs could benefit from another veteran or two in the rotation, and maybe that’s another reason to be wary of the Chicago Bulls later in the Eastern Conference playoffs.
Two weeks ago, I broke down the desirability of each potential first round matchup for the Cavs, rating the Miami Heat and Indiana Pacers as the scariest possible opponents. Especially now that Paul George has returned to the Pacers lineup, the playoff experience of the Pacers and Heat make them much more of a threat than the Brooklyn Nets, Boston Celtics, or Milwaukee Bucks — the Heat and Pacers have “been there before.” After last weekend’s games, it’s unlikely that the Miami Heat will make the playoffs, and the Celtics are the probable matchup with the Cavs, but the Pacers are still lurking.
The Cavs have nearly twice as much playoff experience as the top-seeded Atlanta Hawks, an interesting note as the Hawks have lost favor with odds makers. Maybe the disparity in Team XP between the Cavs and Hawks will manifest itself in the form of tentative and nervous play from the Hawks, should the two teams meet in the Eastern Conference Finals.
What’s interesting in the Western Conference is that the two favorites, the San Antonio Spurs and Golden State Warriors, are at opposite ends of the spectrum. If history is instructive, then the Golden State Warriors need one more season as a team before they’re qualified to win a championship. Maybe the Warriors will prove to be an outlier, and become only the third team to win the Finals with less than 10,000 minutes in playoff experience.
The Spurs, on the other hand, have an intimidating 30,860 minutes of playoff experience, but are attempting to become the first of three teams to win the Finals with a Team XP greater than 30,000. Should the Cavs be fortunate enough to face either the Warriors or the Spurs in the Finals, playoff experience would be viewed as a crucial factor in both scenarios.
Obviously, like all other counting stats, not all playoff minutes are created equal. Many of the Cavs’ playoff minutes reside primarily on the bench, so their Team XP of 18,744 should be taken at a discount. But if intangibles are really as meaningful as they’re made out to be by the media and old-timers, then the stabilizing presence of mature Cavaliers like James Jones, Mike Miller, Shawn Marion, and Kendrick Perkins will minimize the hazard posed by playoff virgins Kyrie Irving, Kevin Love, and Tristan Thompson. In any event, the Cavs roster is constructed to compensate for Irving and Love’s lack of playoff experience, and it will be fascinating to see how the playoffs unfold to confirm or dispel the prevailing narratives.
The chart below illustrates how good and experienced each prospective team playoff is, and how each stands in relation to its peers. Using it, we can group which teams are more or less qualified to win a championship.21
Despite Love and Irving’s Inexperience, the Cavs are as Prepared for the Playoffs as Any Team but the Spurs
For the tl;dr-ers out there, the significance of previous playoff experience is hard to deny. If you’re relying on prior playoff experience to forecast team performance or success in the playoffs — as in to predict playoff wins or playoff win percentage — it’s not going to be particularly helpful.
But my 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 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 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 JR 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.
The answer to the question, “Does playoff experience matter?” appears to most definitely be Yes. But it will be fascinating to see how the playoffs unfold around the narratives we’ve crafted on the meaning of playoff experience, and how the Cavs and their individual players will perform to confirm or dispel those myths. In any event, this weekend is the start of what promises to be an epic postseason.
- For this reason, Tristan Thompson is going to be a playoff broadcaster darling. He’ll probably deserve it, but it will also be annoying. [↩]
- It turns out that other than the fluky, still-impossible-to-believe loss to the Orlando Magic in 2009, every LeBron-era Cavs team was eliminated by a more experienced team. [↩]
- Mental image: circle of be-hoodied individuals, on their knees, bowing up and down around a calculator, chanting, “Thou shalt not take midrange jumpers,” pausing only to pick up their glasses that repeatedly fall off their heads. [↩]
- If significantly less important. [↩]
- I strongly urge you to watch that trailer. [↩]
- Team XP is a cumulative total that remains the same throughout each season’s playoffs. Believing that minutes played were more important than games started or games played, I opted to focus on this measure. I did not distinguish between NBA and ABA minutes, such as Doctor J’s 2064 ABA Playoff minutes. [↩]
- Other individuals have examined experience’s connection to playoff success, including James Tarlow from the University of Oregon, this now-anonymous Reddit user, PoliSam of Blazer’s Edge, and Tom Ziller of SB Nation. Each of them used a much different approach than what is shown here. Tarlow’s study, which was presented at the 2012 MIT Sloan Sports Analytic Conference, concluded “that increased postseason player experience increases a team’s ability to make the playoffs while not increasing their ability to win in the playoffs.” None of the attempts I stumbled across relied on playoff minutes, instead using playoff games or age, and none examined head-to-head matchups in the playoffs. [↩]
- A total of 480 minutes represents the XP attained after competing 20 minutes per game over six games in four different series — basically after a heavily-involved rotation player makes one run to the Finals, two decent playoff runs, or several trips to the playoffs. [↩]
- This was largely what the Tarlow study showed and concluded. This isn’t terribly surprising. Unlike the regular season — where all teams play 82 games against all other teams and a factor’s impact can play out over the course of the season — our playoff test subjects play only one other team at a time, and teams are eliminated after four losses. A team can only win as many as 16 games, be it out of 16 games or 28 games, while many others are eliminated in four or five. [↩]
- There were 46 series where teams had an identical SVs. [↩]
- The mean Team XP for championship teams is 17,895.3 minutes played, and the median is 17,345 minutes played. [↩]
- The 1993-94 Houston Rockets were the only team to do so with exactly five. [↩]
- The 1993-94 Rockets again and the 2003-04 Detroit Pistons. [↩]
- The Lakers and Celtics met three times in the Finals in the 80s. The less experienced Celtics won in 1984; the less experienced Lakers won in 1985; and the more experienced Lakers won in 1987. [↩]
- Up until the 30,000 minute mark, a milestone that only two teams had reached before this season. [↩]
- Many of these categories suffer from a small sample size, as does much of this data. [↩]
- The Cavs acquired Brendan Haywood on June 27, via Basketball-Reference.com. [↩]
- Let’s not neglect to mention Lou Amundson and AJ Price’s 385 minutes of playoff experience. [↩]
- Because I determined teams’ playoff rosters based on those who had played in a game from the start of March until April 10, this number also omits Brendan Haywood’s 1138 minutes, as Haywood has not appeared in a game since February 26. [↩]
- Presumably. [↩]
- The chart was inspired by a chart on transition offenses in a column by Zach Harper of CBS Sports from late March. You should read that, too, as well as my analysis of the Cavs fast break offense from mid-March. [↩]
17 Comments
Playoffs can’t get here soon enough!
Maybe I am missing something but wouldn’t one expect better teams to make the playoffs more often, thus giving them more playoff experience? It would be helpful to see an analysis that corrects for wins during the season or attempts to isolate playoff experience from other skills generally. In short, if the Cavs win it all this season, I anticipate Irving and Love playing a much greater role than Varejao and Perkins.
Yes, the better teams makes the playoffs more often, but the history of the league shows that even those great teams need to accrue playoff experience before they win a championship.
I could adjust the results based on regular season wins at some point. But whether you view Jordan’s Bulls finally beating the Pistons a result of playoff experience or talent and incremental improvement is irrelevant, because nearly all of the great teams in the NBA acquired a lot of playoff experience before winning a championship.
This is impressive stuff, no doubt. But in terms of winning a championship, I’m just relying on what I’ve watched pretty much my whole life when it comes to the NBA: teams just don’t win it all the first time out. We have some definite playoff experience on this roster, but this team is new to one another. From what I can recall, teams usually have to take that disappointing elimination before making the leap. Not nearly as substantive as all this (which, seriously, impressive), but it leads me to think next year is a much better shot at the title for us than this one.
Yea, it might play out that way. Continuity may be even more important than experience, it’s hard to say without looking at that too. I think the 2007-08 Celtics would be the counterexample to what you said, but that’s just one.
In general isn’t the above (and I did read 🙂 ) a nice way of saying teams build their way to success over time? Most teams get gradually better rather than jumping from bottom to top, so of course they have XP, and their guys become SVs. Would be interesting to see if regular season Ws is a better correlation.
I read and read until, finally, the point I thought you missed:
” … not all playoff minutes are created equal. Many of the Cavs’ playoff minutes reside primarily on the bench, so their Team XP of 18,744 should be taken at a discount. But if intangibles are really as meaningful as they’re made out to be by the media and old-timers, then the stabilizing presence of mature Cavaliers like James Jones, Mike Miller, Shawn Marion, and Kendrick Perkins will minimize the hazard posed by playoff virgins Kyrie Irving, Kevin Love, and Tristan Thompson.”
But Kyle, I still think you slinked by this huge point by setting up a straw man. Who says that those who extol a “veteran locker room presence” in the regular season also claim that old guy helps if he’s not a key cog in the shrunken playoff rotation? The change occurs on the floor, when guys aren’t waiting to get in the flow or taking the evening off as occurs every night in the regular season. San Antonio is kind of the Cavs’ mirror image: Pops plays his oldest veterans more and carefully sprinkles in playoff newbies (like Danny Green a few years ago).
The biggest diff in the playoffs is that every possession is magnified: fundamentals count, taking care of the ball and boxing out count, FTs count. And Tristan won’t often be able to convert a jerky offensive move because he won’t be facing a mediocre opponent’s bad back up PF, just like he had trouble as a starter. And that pressure ratchets up more every level a team advances. I think Tristan and Kyrie (especially Kyrie) will be fine, but not because of any advice Perkins or Miller give them. But because all indications are that Kyrie embraces pressure and on-court attention. We’ll see about Love. We don’t know and, frankly, he doesn’t know either.
Impressive amount of work. Looks like experience plays a bigger role than I would have anticipated.
Would be interesting to see whether experienced teams out-perform their seed (or inexperienced underperform).
Excellent read. I’m surprised that the correlation is as strong as that.
The counter-argument will be that “key players'” level of experience matters more than some other players, and that the inexperience of Kyrie Irving and Kevin love will trump the experience of guys like Mike Miller and James Jones. The stats above don’t don’t reflect that distinction. I don’t know if that will be true or not, but I can see the reasoning there.
That aside, people have been throwing around the term “inexperienced” generically with the Cavs all season, and I don’t really understand it. The Cavs traded away Zeller, Bennet, Wiggins, Waiters, Kirk, etc, and largely added veterans. On the Cavs roster are currently 6 guys with championship rings, (although a couple of those guys aren’t going to contribute on the floor) and 10 guys with playoff experience. (if you count the injured Varejao) The only guys on the roster who don’t have playoff experience are Irving, Love, Thompson, Delly, and Harris.
It’s the significant contributions that will be required of those first three that causes all the discussion. I guess short of another round of analysis that attempts to isolate that variable, we’ll have to wait and see.
Kyle’s Mythbusters is a show that I would watch. Great to see this “myth” proven rather than busted.
Best article that I’ve seen in a long time. Thanks!
You might be interested in this recent piece by Sharon Katz of ESPN Stats & Info (great minds think alike this time of year): http://espn.go.com/blog/statsinfo/post/_/id/104601/why-experience-matters-in-the-nba-playoffs
Their (undisclosed) formula purports to weight a team’s playoff experience according to the percentage of the team’s total minutes each player logged this season (thereby accounting for the inexperience of Kyrie, Kevin, and Tristan, three of our four leaders in minutes played). But according to this metric we’re still the 4th most experienced playoff team this year, and the most experienced in the East. (That’s a bit of a surprise because between Gasol and Noah I figured the Bulls would be ahead of us. Goes to show just how many playoff minutes LeBron has logged in his career.)
Thanks, good stuff. The more I think about the way teams like the Cavs play now, especially in the half court grinding offenses of the playoffs, the more it seems vital that your 3-point shooters be experienced, or at least cold-blooded, or too young and/or crazy to feel pressure. Ray Allen over Mo Williams.
I guess that I would just add to that, and say that I’ve tried to show that experience is valuable in addition to wins. Even really really good teams don’t win sometimes.
I mean, with Golden State winning 67 games this year, you would think they’re ready today, no? Where as this shows that they might need another season or even two to get there. We’ll see how it plays out. But you’re right, this shows that success takes time.
Thanks for sharing this. This posted within a few hours of mine, which is crazy. That’s kind of what I was arguing, but going about it indirectly because I didn’t use the proportions for each player.
I’ve never listened to Dave Matthews Band, but judging by my typical shorts and flippy floppies apparently I would love them.
This was a great read thanks for the work you put in.