StatsDetective 10 | NBA + Pace

This is not our first rodeo with pace, but it is much more comprehensive. A while ago, I was trying to see which stats were useful for basketball analysis and which were useless. Pace jumped out at me because the direction of the association was opposite of what I expected, but I filed it away for later.

Most of the time, when pace is discussed by the talking heads, it is presented as a desirable trait in a team. If you want to cherry-pick teams at the top of the pace and win % rankings, you might even convince yourself too. Of course, it would be just as easy to find teams at the bottom of the rankings and do the opposite. So what is the actual story? It is a little bit complicated, but it turns out that on average, teams with higher pace perform worse over the course of a season than those with lower pace. I can think of about a dozen reasons why this might be the case but it all comes down to efficiency. If you are missing more shots, less time has to come off the clock before the other team is on their side of the court and pace goes up. If you are giving up easy shots early in the shot clock, the next possession has begun before it needed to and pace goes up.

In hindsight, it seems very simple but I do think there are other aspects I have yet to discover. At some point, I would love to debunk the absolutely braindead claim that early shot clock shots are magically better and I think there may be a connection. But I digress...