[fearless]

Late-season performance review: Reseeding Round 2
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Hollinger
By John Hollinger
ESPN Insider
Archive

The more I watch the NBA playoffs, the more apparent it is to me that late-season performance is a vastly more important factor than we've been led to believe. For instance, in the last three seasons, Detroit, San Antonio and Miami all made runs after the All-Star break that were much more impressive than their full-season results.

And since a lot of observers (ahem) didn't account for this fully, they ended up underestimating two of those teams' chances in the postseason (San Antonio in 2005 being the exception; didn't take a rocket scientist to pick that one).

But just in case I didn't quite get the point, the basketball gods hammered it over my head in the first round of the playoffs this season. New Jersey, which finished strong, knocked out Toronto, which didn't. Miami, which finished badly, was swept with shocking ease by Chicago.

Baron Davis
Rocky Widner/Getty Images
How long can the Warriors stay on their late-season hot streak?

And then there was Golden State. Its win over Dallas would have been easier to see coming, perhaps, if we had taken more note of just how well the Warriors had played since Baron Davis came back on March 5.

I've already beaten that point into the ground, but I failed until this weekend to notice the opposite half of that argument -- that as good as Dallas' season was, the Mavs didn't exactly finish with a flourish.

In particular, something caught my attention that I don't think has been discussed much, if at all. A friend e-mailed me after the series and said that Dirk Nowitzki's only possible excuse was that he was hurt and not telling anyone. Well, I went digging through the info on his player card, and remembered that Nowitzki did indeed hurt his ankle on March 28 against Milwaukee.

No, I'm not launching an after-the-fact defense of Dirk. Regardless of how he felt, pretty much everybody is less than 100 percent this time of year, and besides, he couldn't have been hurt as badly as Baron Davis was in Game 6.

Instead, my point is that this research caused me to stumble upon something vastly more enlightening -- the fact that Nowitzki wasn't nearly as good after the All-Star break as he was in the first half of the season. Check out his season splits, for instance, and look at that swan dive his numbers took in March and April. Better yet, go through his game log and look for the games with more than 30 points -- you'll notice there are 14 of them before the end of February, and none afterward.

Seen in that context, Nowitzki's failure to deliver in the Golden State series wasn't some colossal collar job. It was the continuation of a second half that fell far short of what he accomplished in a sparkling first half, especially in the month of January. Whether it was a bad ankle or bad feng shui isn't important to me, but what is important is that we could have seen this coming if we had focused more on year-end play. Between Dirk's spring slump and the Warriors' hot finish, the result would have been a whole lot less surprising.

So let's learn from our previous mistakes. Today, I'm doing a reseeding of the remaining eight playoff teams, based on what we know about how they finished the season and how they performed in the first round of the playoffs.

Here's how I did it. For each team, I took their average victory margin in their last 20 "relevant" regular-season games, adjusted for a home-court advantage of three points, and used that as three-quarters of their ratings. The other quarter was composed of how they fared in the first round of the playoffs, based on both average victory margin and the end-of-regular-season ratings of their opponents.

The hard part, as you might have guessed, was figuring out the "relevant" games for each team. I included only games played by their best players, and in nearly every case deleted games from the final week of the season. (There were one or two exceptions when both teams in a given game had reason to actually try). The only time I deviated from this plan was with Washington, whose best players weren't available in the first round; I did the opposite with them and only included the games when Gilbert Arenas and Caron Butler didn't play.

I also didn't go further back than March 1 for any team, except for Utah -- the Jazz had a stretch in late February and early March that was their best of the season and I felt it unfairly penalized them to leave it out.

Obviously there's some serious gray area in this method. But the benefit is that it isolates what teams have done heading into the stretch run, which recent history tells us should be more relevant to a team's playoff odds than what they did in November.

And after crunching all the numbers, here's how the remaining playoff teams rate, from worst to first (the number in parentheses is the team's theoretical victory margin against an average opponent based on this method):


8. Utah (+2.1) -- I secretly think Utah may be a better playoff team than this rating indicates. Why? Because of growing anecdotal evidence that the refs are allowing a lot more physical play in the postseason than they did in the regular season. I say "anecdotal" because free-throw attempts per field-goal attempt are down only slightly in the postseason; certainly not by enough to establish any kind of definitive conclusion.

However, here are three things I do know. First, that I've seen several games when teams were screaming bloody murder about the contact being allowed against their players in the paint. Second, that nearly every televised game has featured comments along the lines of, "Wow, they're really letting them play tonight," at several points during the broadcast. And third, that postgame conferences have been generously peppered with lines like "it was real physical out there."

Like I said, it's nothing provable at this point. But let's suppose the zebras really are letting more contact go than they did in the regular season. Would any team benefit more than Utah? The Jazz play human bumper cars with their screening in the paint, push and hold more than any team in the league at the defensive end, and had the highest rate of opponent free-throw attempts per field-goal attempt in the regular season.

To show you how completely unfazed the Jazz are by physical play, here's a quick story from Game 7 in Houston. After hearing from the Rockets' end how physical things had been, especially in the paint, I asked Jerry Sloan why he thought it had been such a physical series.

"Physical? Where?" said Sloan. "I don't think it's been a very physical series at all."

And by Utah's standards, I'm sure it wasn't.

Anyway, other than paying somebody to pull a Gillooly on Baron Davis, this is Utah's best shot of beating Golden State -- to use the blocking and tackling prowess of Carlos Boozer, Mehmet Okur, Matt Harpring and Jarron Collins to grind down the faster Warriors. As with almost every Utah game, a bunch depends on how quick the refs are with the whistle. As long as physical play is allowed, the Jazz have a much better shot than my method shows.


7. New Jersey (+2.4) -- The Nets' play since Richard Jefferson returned has been more worthy of attention than I've given it, which is why they slipped past Utah into the No. 7 slot on this list (well, that and Utah's rocky finish to the regular season).

It's not just because of RJ, either. A second unit that was a liability for most of the season turned into a positive down the stretch, as Josh Boone and especially Bostjan Nachbar have been able to provide the Nets with long-absent scoring punch off the bench. The Nets still face a major obstacle in not having home court for any playoff series the rest of the way, thanks to their 41-41 regular-season record. But they benefit from being in the East's easy bracket, against ...


6. Cleveland (+5.0) -- Isn't it a horrible injustice that the Cavs-Nets winner will still be playing on Memorial Day weekend while either the Spurs or Suns sit at home? Is anyone else bothered that what are arguably the two worst teams left in the tournament are playing each other at this point, while the two best are doing the same in a different part of the bracket?

Despite its poor rating, Cleveland is in pretty good position to make a deep run. The Nets are beatable, obviously, and the Cavs will have home-court advantage in the conference finals if the Bulls can manage to upset Detroit. Incidentally, the Cavs' rating was hurt by their uninspiring performance against the Washington Damaged Goods in the first round; Cleveland's regular-season finish was at least as strong as that of Detroit and Chicago. Even now, the margin between the three is minimal.


5. Chicago (+5.4) -- This might mildly surprise some folks who fell hard for the Bulls after their sweep of Miami but, as I've argued all week, that series said a lot more about the Heat than it did about Chicago. (Incidentally, the rating doesn't include Chicago's Game 1 implosion against Detroit, or any other second-round games).

The Bulls' Game 1 whipping against Detroit at least slowed the torrent of passengers climbing aboard the Chicago bandwagon. It also gives us a fine opportunity to drag out the Pau Gasol horse for another beating. As good as Luol Deng was in Round 1, I'm still amazed that the Bulls didn't throw their chips into the pot and go for it while they had the chance. P.J. Brown's expiring contract won't be around to facilitate a trade this summer or next year, and if the Pistons vanquish the Bulls they may end up pondering this non-move for a long time.


4. Detroit (+5.7) -- Well, Flip Saunders certainly isn't repeating last year's mistake of peaking too early. If you include Game 1 of the Chicago series, the Pistons are 5-0 in the postseason. Perhaps more impressively, they're No. 1 among playoff teams in both offensive efficiency and defensive efficiency. That's been the biggest difference between Flip and Larry Brown -- his Pistons teams have been as potent on offense as they are on defense.

Yes, those ratings are a little skewed since four of the games were against the Magic. But given how good the Pistons have looked this April, how much mettle they've shown in previous postseasons, and how beatable the other teams in the East look, it's looking more and more like Detroit will head to its third Finals in four years.


3. Phoenix (+7.2) -- The Suns hit a few bumps at midseason but pulled themselves together nicely down the home stretch; I would argue they outplayed Dallas over the season's final 20 games and would have been likely to avenge last year's conference finals defeat had the two met.

Instead, they drew the short end of the stick by drawing the Spurs in the second round, where they're literally getting their noses bloodied by a team that matches up against them better than anyone. All of which will leave the league's TV partners crying in their cereal every morning, as the league's most telegenic team is likely to be done sometime in the next fortnight. Can't we have the Suns play New Jersey or Utah instead?


2. Golden State (+7.3) -- Just in case I haven't hammered this point home yet: Golden State with a healthy Baron Davis and a healthy Jason Richardson is a scary, scary team. The Warriors score, they pressure the ball and force turnovers, they can spread the floor with shooters and run you ragged, and (shhhh!) they even have a real center, if they feel like playing one, in the rapidly improving Andris Biedrins.

That said, I would quibble with the Warriors' outranking the Suns for one reason: It assumes perfect health. In Golden State's case, this may be a cavalier assumption. Davis has a bad hammy that could limit him in the Utah series, while Matt Barnes also is wounded. And even if Davis can overcome the hamstring problem, there's no guarantee he won't hurt something else three days from now.

But fully healthy? I'd take these Warriors over just about anybody. Even without home court they're a solid favorite against Utah in Round 2, and are good enough that they could knock off Phoenix and shock the world if they got to the conference finals. Well, if they played Phoenix, that is. Which would be the greatest series ever, but probably won't happen, because there's one little problem in the way ...


1. San Antonio (+11.0) -- Look at the difference between San Antonio's rating and the rest of the teams. The difference between the Spurs and No. 2 Golden State is bigger than the difference between Golden State and No. 6 Cleveland.

With Dallas out of the picture and the Spurs already seizing home-court advantage from the Suns, San Antonio has to be considered an overwhelming favorite right now to win the championship. Consider this: The Spurs played the No. 2 team on this list, Golden State, twice after Baron Davis came back in March. Keep in mind the Warriors are 18-4 in their other games with Davis since then. But against the Spurs they lost twice by a combined total of 50 points.

[Archie]

Thank you for the great article. I'm not the ESPN insider, so could read it completely.