I've seen a few posts about how the playoffs are a lock because the East is terrible etc...
I'm not sure people understand how bad we are, and how reasonable our schedule has been so far.
We've played more games than anyone else in the NBA and our win % would actually put us in 9th in the East. If every team had played 82 games we actually wouldn't make the playoffs in the East.*Yes, the East is terrible- but the schedule has meant we've managed to avoid the West nicely so far and played our own terrible Eastern conference teams 13 times- Mind you we've only won 7 of those 13 games vs the pathetic Eastern teams.
4 of those 7 wins have been against the Magic and the Bucks.
Against Western conference teams? We are 1 win and 6 losses. Yeah we beat the Jazz. Mmmkaay.
Notice there's at worst a 3 to 4 game difference between us in 4th and the Nets in 13th in the East too.
I guess the real truth syrup/Kool Aid are the hard stats:
*23rd in turnovers
(bottom 8 team)*19th in 3 point %, being 24th in 3 point attempts.
(bottom 12 team)*25th in points scored and 26th in offensive rating. (points per 100 possessions).
(both bottom 5 in NBA)*23nd in +/- rating. Our rating is (-3.1)(bottom 9 team). You may have seen this before as 'MOV' for Margin of victory. It takes the points scored vs opponents points scored and averages it over games played. We are the
8th worst in the league.*What makes the above stat alarming is our strength of schedule performance is also bottom 7 in the league at (-1.4). So even with a good- very good schedule compared to the rest of the league, we are still 1.4 behind per game, which is the 24th rank in the NBA.
(7th worst)*The one great stat at the moment is our opponents points per game. At 96.8 we are ranked 7th in the NBA. Again the only problem is our scoring is ranked 93.8 (-3 point average).
*In rebounding we are 19th- but with only 20 games played, and the majority of them being against the weak Eastern conference- it's hard to determine how bad we'll be...for comparison, Milwaukee at the 29th rank in rebounding, are only 1.9 rebounds worse than us per game at 39.5 RPG (we are 41.4 per game).
*Our SRS rating (a rating that takes into account average point differential and strength of schedule) is 23rd at (-4.45).
(8th worst in the NBA.)
So yeah, our schedule has been one of the nicer in the NBA, and we've only won a single game against the Western conference.
(and only played 7 Western teams).
Don't be surprised to see things pretty much only go downhill from here.
*Crawford, Green and Sully have been our best players by far. Bass has been solid and Olynyk, although appearing awkward out there on the offensive end, is coming along nicely per 36 at 12 points 8 rebounds.
-Green is at 17.4 points and 4.5 rebounds per 36
-Sully is looking unreal with 18 points and 10 rebounds a game, his 3 point shooting % has climbed over 30% so lets hope it keeps climbing.
-Crawford is blowing everyone's minds and averaging 16 points and 6.5 assists a game. He's averaging slightly more than 2 turnovers and still loves to chuck vomit at the hoop but he is finding a way to score around the rim more than he has shown in the past. He's also passing like a true point guard and he's found his niche. He's going to be a very valuable asset come draft night/deadline day. We may just keep him for ourselves.
I don't know if Danny would be worried about how well Crawford is playing, but if it were not for him we'd potentially be at least 3 games further in the hole.
We have Green and Crawford coming back to reality with their 3 point percentages, but even Crawford at 38% should drop slightly further to under 35%. Green is hovering right around average at 38%.
*Avery Bradley continually makes the case that he's not worth re-signing to anything more than 2-3 million a year with 30% 3 point shooting and 43% from the field. Does Danny cash in on Bradley's trade value as a defender while he's still pretty coveted?
*Wallace and Lee are shooting 43% and 48% from 3 point land so we should expect those numbers to drop to under 35% too.
* As we play more teams in the NBA with size and length inside, our rebounding, field goal and shooting efficiencies will probably decline. Our opponents points will probably climb because the teams in the West are offensively orientated teams when you start creeping to the top (Minnesota and above basically- well even the Suns are like that).
I also don't know how much difference Rondo makes even if he's back by January or late December. Do they play him more than 10 mins a game for the first 5 -10 games?
But yeah, if the season ended we would not make the playoffs.
There's a long, long, looooong way to go. The Western conference is going to be the real test- but I'm excited to see our boys take it to the other younger squads in the West like Phoenix, New Orleans and Golden State.
So brace yourselves.
Topic: Will we make the playoffs this year? Standings, stats and numbers (merged) (Read 39317 times)