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OPENING TIP
Is your basketball team kind of average? Are your best players injured or missing? Are you the Orlando Magic? If so, you may be worried about winning that first round playoff series. And you should be. In the past 36 years, an 8 seed has knocked off a 1 seed exactly 4 times. But letâs say they make you play the games anyway. What strategy should you adopt?
One option is to take your usual strategy (the one that got you to the playoffs), put your best lineups on the floor, and perhaps some lucky bounces can lead to some surprise wins. Maybe some extra defensive effort. As Stan Van Gundy would say:
This approach might be the best way to maximize expected wins, but if that means losing 4-2 instead of 4-0, does it really matter? (Ed. Note: it does not.)
Another option, and one that we are starting to see more often, is to crank up the variance and hope to catch fire for long enough to win a series. As variance increases, your teamâs expected wins might actually suffer, but your chances of getting to that elusive 4th win improve.Â
Malcolm Gladwell has written about strategies to use in this kind of âasymmetricâ situation. Here is his gem of a piece about the full court press and how Vivek Ranadive (!?) used it to give an undermanned team a leg up [1]. All too often we will see an underdog take a more conservative approach, and itâs not hard to understand why. Ask Brett Brown what getting swept does for your job security. But if the point is maximizing your chance of advancing to the next round, pursuing volatility is probably the way to go.Â
And the most straightforward way of increasing variance is embracing a trend you may have noticed if youâve stumbled across an NBA game in the last three or four years: three point attempts, so very, very many three point attempts.
So letâs say for a moment you ARE the Orlando Magic. You are a team that hangs its hat on defensive effort, and shoots three pointers poorly. You are down 3-1, and the money line for you to win the Eastern Conference is currently +10,000. Could it be possible that taking 3s in massive volume was still the best approach? We suspect so. Â
Looking back at one of the only other 1 vs. 8 upsets, the 2007 Warriors over the Dallas Mavericks, a Warriors team that led the NBA in 3 point attempts still managed to take almost 20% MORE threes in that playoff round. Â
A Houston Rockets team with one All Star pushed a Warriors team with four to the brink multiple times; Rockets GM Daryl Morey readily acknowledged they used just this strategy.
Turning to the illustration below, if you assume that Orlando needed to score significantly more points than its regular season average to beat the Bucks, the team would be better off pursing a high variance strategy with greater three point attemptsâeven if it that meant lower expected scoring overall. This type of risky approach would result in a higher likelihood of outscoring the Bucks (see Area B).
And there is another interesting phenomenon that might be at work this year. Turns out, players shoot a lot better in an empty gym. Witness Gilbert Arenas hitting 95 out of 100 three pointers with a bag of cash at his feet. Or Dwight Howard making 80% of his free throws in practice (really!). But weâre seeing it play out in real life in the bubble. Offenses are on fire. The Mavericks set the mark for the best statistical offense in history this year, and there are currently eight teams scoring better than that.
It is likely to be too late for the Magic this year, but donât be surprised if you see the bombs start dropping faster than ever in the Magic Kingdom for the rest of this strange season.
TWEET OF THE WEEK
Ed. Note: Savage.
SAVED BY THE LOTTERY?
The NBA lottery took place with its usual pomp and circumstance on Thursday (just kidding! this yearâs drawing apparently took place in a cafeteria) and was a disappointment to fans of everyone but the Timberwolves (another little joke, there are no Timberwolves fans).
But all the awkwardness and jokes belie that fact that it is easily the most important day of the NBA calendar. The lottery, more than any other force in game today, determines the fate of the NBA for years to come. Â
One of the reasons we are so fixated on the lottery is that the stakes are so massive. As the earth-shaking game that Luka Doncic had on Sunday demonstrates, a single player can have a massive impact on his teamâs fortunes relative to other sports. The Nationals may be able to lose the biggest free agent on the market and win the World Series, but ask the Cavaliers how thatâs going for them in basketball.
The 2004 Detroit Pistons is the only team in the last twenty years to win the NBA Championship without a top 10 player. For a team like Minnesota, that struggled for years to attract free agent talent to play alongside Kevin Garnett, the draft is its best, and likely only, hope to likewise find help for Karl Anthony Towns.Â
Given that the lottery is many teams' only real chance to land a LeBron of their own, how the ping pong balls bounce can define the fortunes of a franchise for decades. Thus, tanking, and the competition problems we've discussed previously. The lottery typically gets a brief two day spurt of coverage and then the media world moves on, but as most of us wait for the championship to define the season, executives know the big day has already come and gone.
WHERE THE TOP PICKS MIGHT GO
Consensus has quickly formed around the 2020 Draft, and that consensus is: meh. Teams have serious concerns about each of the top tier of players, from Anthony Edwardsâ lack of defensive intensity and horrible shot selection, to Lameloâs ugly jump shot. The last draft with such anemic player projections produced arguably the worst number one pick of all time, Anthony Bennett to the Cavs in 2013.
But smart teams can find talented players in any draft. 2013 was no exception: while Bennett barely made it to 150 career games played, #2 overall pick Victor Oladipo has been an impact player, and perhaps the best player in the league slipped all the way to #15.Â
While the next Giannis may not be on the board, the 2020 draft offers up a range of talented players. Probably. And because you werenât going to, STL compiled some of the best mock drafts to give us a look at where those players might end up.
AT THE BUZZER
The Delete 8 get their own sad, lonely bubbles
The anatomy of a terrible hire, or Jim Boylenâs time in Chicago (The Athletic, paywall)
The dump button vs. Carmelo Anthonyâs constant cussing
Dame and the evolution of the long three (WSJ, paywall)
If you think the AAU basketball scene is hardcore, check out this amazing story on Brazilian soccer scouting (NYT, paywall)
Notes
[1] Thatâs right, current Kings owner Vivek Ranadive! Perhaps drafting Marvin Bagley ahead of Luka Doncic was an insurgent strategy so sophisticated the rest of the league remains baffled to this day.