Mapping the NBA: Come On Win Young
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tziller posted 1/29/2008 from ballhype.com [flag] |
As Portland has conducted its scorched mirth campaign into contention this season, much has been written about the team's success despite its young aggregate age. How unprecedented is the success? Well, it's unprecedented. Take a look.
Pancakes in the Age of Enlightenment
A quick explainer: the x-axis signifies team quality, with below average teams on the left and good teams to the right. The y-axis signifies team age, with younger teams on top and older teams lower on the map. Quality is straight winning percentage, with the y-intercept as .500. Team age is a team's age weighted by minutes played -- Greg Oden hasn't played a minute, and thus does not affect Portland's team age in any way, for example. The average team age for this study -- the 2005-06 season to today, with 120 team-seasons counted -- is roughly 26.7 years old.
So in our four quadrants, we can generalize like this: the top-left includes young, bad teams. The closer to the middle, the less young and the less bad. The teams in the top-right quadrant are still younger than average, but they win more than half their games. In the bottom-right, we have older, good teams (including all recent NBA champions and most finalists)... and there's the bottom-left: bad and old.
So how about the Blazers? They certainly aren't alone in the young-good quadrant; Utah 2007 is in there, with Washington 2005 and each of the Lakers last three rosters (this year included), as well as a dozen other squads. Yet only one young team has seen such success in the past few years: the 2005 Phoenix Suns, starring young stars Amare Stoudemire, Joe Johnson, Shawn Marion, and Quentin Richardson (not to mention resident geezer Steve Nash). But the '05 Suns were a full year-and-half older than these Blazers, much closer to the league's average age than the league's youngest squads.
Portland is the third youngest team in our study, and according to other reports the third youngest team in NBA history (which makes sense; the league is getting younger). The two teams younger than Portland? The 2006 Hawks (who won 26 games) and the 2007 Celtics (who won 24). Portland's on pace for 48 wins. The performance at this collective is amazing, to be sure. (And Henry Abbott noted to me the team's doing it without any impact rookies on the court -- even more astounding.) But Portland's improbable success not the only thing to take away from this map.
Let's take a second to explain that in no way does this study assert young=bad and old=good, though that's how the correlation tends to work out (with a 0.53 correlation coefficient between weighted team age and winning percentage in this study). Notice the relative lack of 'old, bad' teams. Why do we have this? Two major reasons.
- Bad teams, at some point, give up and play the youngsters. See: Miami 2008, who could end up in the young-bad quadrant, depending on Shaquille O'Neal's injury.
- Bad teams draft higher, which makes them more likely to grab an impact youngster who soaks up a lot of minutes but aren't conducive to immediate success. See: Seattle 2008, with Kevin Durant and Jeff Green.
In other words, bad teams don't usually stick with the status quo (necessitating a move youngward) while good teams typically tinker instead of shake. Tinkering around the edges will keep an old team old; shaking an old team will typically result in a team getting younger.
With that said, let's peer into the results from the 2006-07 season to discern which teams should have spent the summer shaking and which were fine tinkering.
The Quadrant of the Hopeless
Four teams finished in the Quadrant of the Hopeless last season: Minnesota, Sacramento, Indiana and the Clippers. How many of these teams got to shaking? One. The other three barely tinkered: Sacramento drafted a 19-year-old (Spencer Hawes) but signed a 31-year-old (Mikki Moore) to block him in the rotation, Indiana made the major move of... signing Travis Diener, and the Clippers drafted the oldest guy in the class (Al Thornton) and brought in a 32-year-old point guard (Brevin Knight) to back up its 39-year-old point guard (Sam Cassell). Minnesota, meanwhile, shaved about 3 years of age off its team with its trades with Boston and Miami.
When I first gandered at this particular map, one of the things which struck me was Boston's station as the youngest 2006-07 team by far. The allegations of tanking have been well-documented. Could looking at changes in weighted team age help reveal patterns of tanking in the NBA? To do this, I teased out age/quality statistics from the first 41 games of 2006-07 to see if any teams got a ton younger in the second half.
The Tanking Witch Hunt of 2007
Boston got much older in the second half of 2006-07; in fact, only one team had a bigger positive age difference than the Celtics! (Miami, who was 30.3 years old in the second half, thanks to Shaq, Alonzo Mourning and Gary Payton.) As Boston was the key target in the Tanking Witch Hunt of 2007, looking at age isn't a good way to consider self-saboteurs. (Though, it further explains why the 06-07 Celtics were so terrible: They tanked the season by playing their veterans more. Ugh.)
You'll note something else about this map: Only three of the five teams in the Quadrant of the Hopless ended up in the same place at year's end. Miami and New Jersey rescued themselves in similar ways: They both got markedly older. Explanation? Both had injuries to veteran stars in the first half, marring their quality marks. It's an important consideration to take into account as we look at this year's midseason map...
At the Gates of Hell
Both Miami and the Clippers can blame injuries for their leftwardness, but enough is enough and Pat Riley/Elgin Baylor should have had eee-nough by now. The Heat's winning percentage is on par with Minnesota's... and the Heat are three years older. Again, youth doesn't ensure future success; the Hawks and Bobcats have each languished in the Quadrant of Beautiful Suck for the past four years. There's no automatic passage from Beautiful Suck to Gritty Success. But the road from deep in the Quadrant of the Hopeless (where MIA and LAC are) to Gritty Success (DEN, DAL, DET) is blocked, and it won't reopen... not even for Shaq or Elton Brand. The future for the Heat and Clippers is clear, and it is not pretty.
Two more quick points:
- Boston's summer moves made the team almost four years older. The Celtics went from the youngest to the 8th-oldest in one summer.
- The three oldest teams since 2005: The 2008 Spurs, the 2007 Spurs and the 2006 Spurs. And the 2005 Spurs are the 12th oldest among the 120 teams. I can imagine Matt Powell from Pounding the Rock rolling around in the fetal position in his James White jersey.
All data collected from Basketball-Reference.com and Doug Steele, except current season data, which was taken from a recent Bradford Doolittle article at Basketball Prospectus.
Tags:
NBA
Miami Heat
Los Angeles Clippers
Portland Blazers
Sacramento Kings
San Antonio Spurs
Comments (14)
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tykeenan Props to TZ for the less obvious Mogwai reference in the title.
Heat/Clippers Fear Satan.
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tziller Nice!
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Sarge but i thought that cleveland wasn't "good?"
Nice work, Ziller. Could Indiana and New Jersey be more average than they've been over the last year or so?
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ranter fantastic work - and the "Pancakes in the Age of Enlightenment" subtitle was just the icing on the cake - nice job -
Brew Hoop Great work, Tom. I feel better equipped to rationalize the Bucks' problems now... -
mcwelk Utah got younger with the acquisition of Kutcher, although giving CJ Miles more burn (and retiring Harpring and "Tree" Collins) would really put them in Portland territory, particularly since 48-yo Oden will skew the Blazer metric next year. -
year2000ready Yeah I'm nitpicking a great chart, but why not use point differential instead of winning percentage? Weighting by minutes played was pretty sweet, though I'm also wondering if you could also weight by production. For example, Charlotte gives Jeff McInnis tons of minutes and gets seemingly nothing out of them. Weighting by produciton could show Charlotte to be even younger since they're getting all significant production out of younger guys, even though a guy like McInnis gets significant minutes.
And, as a Mavs fan, I must add that I hope the Suns Will Be Skeletons soon.
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to2e A subtle point which I think is important in understanding the good/old correlation: better players survive longer in the league.
Also, in regards to this years team from Portland, I've heard it said that one of the distinguishing features of the team is that many of the players are of similar age. This makes me wonder, is there any kind or correlation between team success and the spread (i.e. standard deviation) of the ages on the team?
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KellyDwyer How is it that nobody's said "hold your horses, Voltaire" to Tom, yet? -
stevensean Nice analysis. The results agree with common sense, I think. I also agree with to2e's comment that better players tend to survive longer, making the older teams tend to be better.
One small point - from the 2006-07 charts, it looks to me like the Celtics got younger in the 2nd half. In the full year chart they appear to be just under 24 yrs, and in the 1st half chart it looks like just over 24 yrs. So they would have had to get younger to pull that average down.
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kennethcwilbur It's a good analysis. I'd just like to see the current year's analysis done using NBA experience in place of age. I'd think then you would see a much bigger difference in the Y axis between Atlanta and Minnesota, for example. Experience is arguably a better predictor of winning than age.
Links (11)
Old Teams, Good Teams, Young Teams, Bad Teams
Published 1/29/2008 at ESPN.com - True Hoop - Blog
... A very informative series of charts from Tom Ziller on Ballhype compare the age of various teams to how much they win. ...
Youthful Destitution
Published 1/29/2008 by TZ <info@sactownroyalty.com> at Sactown Royalty: Front Page Posts
Remember, like, 17 years ago when mapped the NBA? I finally got around to a sequel, focusing on age. Sacramento, last season, was one of four teams at the midway point with an above-average team age and a below-average winning percentage. The winning percentage hasn't changed much, but the team is actually younger this year. It's likely owed to the difference between Spencer Hawes (19) and Shareef Abdur-Rahim (30), with Beno Udrih (25) for Mike Bibby (29) also helping the team get younger in real terms. Atlanta and Charlotte have been stuck in the young-bad sector ...
Tuesday Fossas
Published 1/29/2008 by Seth
Happy Tuesday, children. The Knicks are in L dot A dot tonight to face the Lakers. Let's wander about the interwebs a bit before the game. The Knicks: young, bad. If this is an accurate indication of what Starburys do to your ankles, then I fully support Steph's decision to have surgery. (Tip of the hat to Kelly Dwyer). The fossa is a tree-climbing relative of the mongoose native to Madagascar. It's also a ferocious hunter and extremely agile. You might say its the Renaldo Balkman ...
Four-Point Play: Top 10 Moon Dunk Ideas
Published 1/29/2008 at Courtside
... Ideas Posted by Jeff Wong on January 29, 2008 • Tonight begins the home-and-home series with the Washington Wizards, 7 PM on T he S inister N etwork. Brian Taylor, Washington resident and Hoops Addict writer , warns us to look out for hot-shooting Deshawn Stevenson and Brendan Haywood. The Wiz are shooting better now thanks to former Raptors coach Dave Hopla, who teaches his players to avoid BS (that's "Bad Shots"). • Super clever blogger Tom Ziller looks at age versus wins in the NBA . Thankfully, no Mark Phillipoussis . Also thankfully, the ...
The 10-man rotation, starring the future of the NBA
Published 1/29/2008 at Ball Don't Lie
... C: Ballhype.
This has been all over the World Wide Web Of Information Superhighways by now,
but I'm linking to it just in case you haven't seen it: Tom Ziller's breakdown
of the youngest, oldest, bestest, and worstest NBA teams. If you're a Blazer
fan, you're loving life. If you're a Bulls fan, who watched a team full of 22
year-olds win 47 games back in 2005, you're probably throwing things. ...
Rebuilding: Building A Contender vs. Blowing It Up
Published 1/29/2008 by Spartacus at 3 Shades of Blue - A Memphis Grizzlies Blog
... The impetus for this post came about after reading Tom Ziller's great article on Ballhype, that is best described as a study of the relationship between a team's average age and win totals. In the article, Ziller splits the results according to 4 categories: Good, Bad, Young and Old. Then the teams are placed on a simple graph to see how they line up. The Grizzlies not-so-surprisingly fall into the "Bad" category for the past season and a half. However, they also qualify for the "Young" designation, given that their average age is 25.3 -- 24.9 if you don't include ...
Bobcats 107 - Clippers 100
Published 1/30/2008 by ClipperSteve <info@clipsnation.com> at Clips Nation: Front Page Posts
... By the way, there's an interesting statistical analysis of Team Age and Team Success by Tom Ziller on BallHype right now (hat tip to ...
Rebuilding: Building A Contender vs. Blowing It Up
Published 2/1/2008 by Spartacus at 3 Shades of Blue - A Memphis Grizzlies Blog
... The impetus for this post came about after reading Tom Ziller's great article on Ballhype, that is best described as a study of the relationship between a team's average age and win totals. In the article, Ziller splits the results according to 4 categories: Good, Bad, Young and Old. Then the teams are placed on a simple graph to see how they line up. The Grizzlies not-so-surprisingly fall into the "Bad" category for the past season and a half. However, they also qualify for the "Young" designation, given that their average age is 25.3 -- 24.9 if you don't include ...
NBA Web Roundup - Video Games, Rudy Gay and Artest is Still Crazy
Published 2/1/2008 by Str8Hoops at Str8Hoops NBA Blog
... Links from around the NBA…
I’m not even going to try to explain this Charles Barkley Video Game
Speaking of video games… here is a history of basketball video games
All Star Reserves are named… and I’m not pleased
I can’t believe 60% of NBA players are broke 5 years after retirement
Don’t believe veteran teams win in the NBA? Here’s proof
ESPN’s Chad Ford chats about trade ...
The Bleaker Rankings: Milwaukee's A-Team Loses to a Glorified D-League Squad
Published 3/25/2008 by Tom Ziller at FanHouse
... be so ineffective in late-game situations ... it's got to be a nervous in Big D. And don't forget how old this team is -- they were the 5th oldest before trading 26-year-old ...
San Antonio Wants to Get Younger, Signs 35-Year-Old Kurt Thomas
Published 7/22/2008 by Tom Ziller at FanHouse
... for the team for a few months last season after a wink-nod-wink deal with the SuperSonics involving Brent Barry and Francisco Elson. (The Spurs sent Barry and Elson to Seattle, who is run by former Spurs exec Sam Presti. Presti cut Barry, who returned to San Antonio. Also, it has been alleged Presti left a better deal from Orlando on the table in order to gift Thomas to his old buddies. Sam Presti is one shady milkman.) The Spurs of 2007-08 were the oldest team in the NBA since at least 2004 (and quite possibly the mid-1990s). Adding Roger ...
I love these things. In my book, Phoenix has the most depressing progression since '04-05--going from young to old with nothing to show for it. Can we agree that selling draft picks is a bad idea?
Also, last year's Quadrant of the Hopeless team that blew up their roster has now won 3 of 4 (with a road loss to the Celtics).