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Mapping the NBA: Come On Win Young
tziller posted 1/29/2008 from ballhype.com
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.
