Analysis The Race for Home-Court Advantage - 25/26 Playoffs Seed Tracker

Will the Spurs get HCA in the '25-26 Playoffs?

  • Total voters
    67
wEmBoY said:
Lebron was the 2nd in mvp voting that year not Dirk. Kobe was 4th.
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Wow, didn't remember :st-lol:. Well, that was arguably as egregious if not more, being the 4th place team in the Leastern conference and a 50-32 team. Sure his teammates minus Big Z were terrible, but still, imo that year was pretty unique in that neither of the 1st place team stars were considered because their teams were stacked, Nash only won it because their team finished #2 because Amare missed 79 out of 82 games that year, and that was the year that caused Stern to realize the mistake the league made by making 3 divisions in each conference after the expansion.
 
ambchang said:
I ran a simple linear regression model to estimate FTAs based on attempts in the restricted area, paint+non-restricted area, mid-range, and 3 pointers. Not surprisingly all of them have positive t-stat values, with Restricted Area having 18.14, Paint/Non-RA at 6.58, mid range at 10.79, but 3P at only 2.86 (2 is a general rule of thumb good indicator), but keep in mind that of course the more shots you take the more FTA you get, and I would expect the closer to the basket the more likely you will get FTs from them, which is why I am very surprised that not only does mid-range has a higher t-stat than paint/non-RA shots, but it has the highest coefficient amongst the 4 shot types. Part of the reason is because the league as a whole shoots much less mid-rangers than the other shot types. So far this season, there were only about 20K mid range shots, whereas there were close to 57K RA shots, 40K P/Non-RA shots, and 83K 3P shots, which means that the impact of each mid range shot will simply be magnified, assuming. more FGA leads to more FTA.

Now plugging the numbers back to each individual player by aligning the coefficients (I hard set the y-intercept as 0, because if you shoot 0 FGA, you should get 0 FTM), I ranked the players by raw number of FTA exceeding expectations.

Note that Shai isn't that ridiculous in terms of getting FTs, ranking #6, while Luka, Avdjia and Harden are just so far ahead of everybody else. This is also a function of how many times you shoot as well, of course. The more shots you shoot, the more magnified the variance. Play style also factors in, Castle, Zion, Giannis and Randle are known to play bully ball, so they get more fouls. This can be seen by their high % of RA and Paint FGAs.
What is interesting is that Shai has by far the most mid range shots amongst the group. Booker is the only person who shot mid rangers more than any other types of 2 points shots, but Shai's RA shots and mid range shots are almost the same, and he has significantly less non-RA paint shots. Back to the earlier point, mid range shots had a notable impact on the FTAs, because most people took so few of them.

Given the hypothesis is that Shai is getting so many FTs despite his shot diet, I removed Shai from the set, and ran the regression again, and coefficient for mid-range shots went from 0.534 to 0.491, which is rather significant given that he is just 1 of a sample of over 500 data lines.

All I can say is, perhaps he is getting more than his share of FTAs, but the league, as a whole, has been rewarding mid-range shooters with more FTs at that range.

Now for the true conspiracy theorists out there, the team with the most additional FTAs compared to expected FTAs using shot profile? Of course, the Lakers, with a rather staggering 54 more FTs than the 2nd placed Cavs, and overall 268 FTAs more than expected, that is more than 3.6 FTAs a game more than expected. Truly staggering.

EDIT: I couldn't cut and paste the table in for some reason.
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This is really cool. One thing that would make it more helpful is if you gave us a visualization of the data, like maybe a scatterplot with regression line.
 
400a793848537fca3bc5090b99fdfc89.jpg
 
DAF86 said:
If you go by raw numbers then Wemby shouldn't even be in the discussion, yet you are saying he should win it. Get in the same page with yourself.
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wemby is leading the league in blocks by a preposterous amount.. he has an easy case. SGA just doesn't
 
^if you take that argument, then there are 2 possible results: Donut wins as is above SGA in every stat and is the overall better player or wemby wins since defence is part of the game and this isn't the nfl that rewards the two phases separately. Either way you can't make the sga argument.
 
Im a little bit worried about facing the suns in the playoffs for the reason brooks has the ability to shut down wemby.
 
DAF86 said:
If you go by raw numbers then Wemby shouldn't even be in the discussion, yet you are saying he should win it. Get in the same page with yourself.
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Per 36 minutes, you know when players are on the court.
Among qualifying MVP candidates:

Pts
1st FT Princess
2nd Donutcic
3rd Victor Wemby

So FT Princess barely beats Wemby in points while Wemby blows his shit away in every other metric, not the least of which is Defense.
 
Robz4000 said:
If Brooks is able to shut down Wemby then the Spurs were never contenders tbh. OKC has half a roster full of better defenders than him.
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Brooks didnt play for all the games we played the subs. So we dont know. I just based it last 2 ssason where brooks was able to shut down wemby everytime spurs play the rockets.
 
wEmBoY said:
Brooks didnt play for all the games we played the subs. So we dont know. I just based it last 2 ssason where brooks was able to shut down wemby everytime spurs play the rockets.
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Looks like the last time they played each other was last fall. He's a tougher match-up than most for Wemby but there's no reason to think that Wemby and the coaches will figure out where and how to get him involved in the offense in a playoff series.

https://www.statmuse.com/nba/ask/wembanyama-vs.-dillon-brooks
 
If Wemby and this team can’t figure out how to score with Dillon Brooks guarding him for an entire series, then Wemby isn’t nearly as good as we all think he is tbh :st-lol:

Which brings me to a tangent: I’m so damn excited for playoff Wemby. Best-of-7 series are where you find out who is the real deal. How will he make adjustments over the course of a series? How will he then react to the opposing team’s adjustments? These type of things are what separate great regular season players from the all-time true greats in this league. Based on how much he’s grown just over the course of the season, I think we could see him shine even more in the playoffs compared to the regular season.
 
wEmBoY said:
Im a little bit worried about facing the suns in the playoffs for the reason brooks has the ability to shut down wemby.
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In a 7 game series, Wemby will make Brooks his bitch. I have zero absolute zero doubt of that. I don’t care about regular season numbers. He will destroy Brooks.
 
Does Timmy Duncan weigh in on strategy sessions from time to time?
If not team then maybe just for Wemby?
 
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