Comments on: How Does Pace Really Work?

By: Sunday Notebook: Cautious Optimism, Terrible Jokes From Cleveland, Vintage Truth | Boston Celtics Basketball - Celtics news, rumors and analysis - CelticsHub.com

Sun, 21 Mar 2010 16:42:55 +0000

[...] and that whole thing about the C’s struggling against fast-paced teams? It’s actually not true, but research is really hard and the Leno joke generator is so much [...]

By: Notes from Golden State » Boston Celtics Basketball – Celtics news, rumors and analysis – CelticsHub.com

Tue, 29 Dec 2009 15:30:39 +0000

[...] * Finally, this loss was extremely rare in one sense: It is the C’s first loss in the last two seasons against one of the league’s five fastest-paced teams in which the C’s played closer to the fast club’s pace than their own middling/slow pace, according to my prior research. [...]

By: Charrua

Charrua — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:21:27 +0000

I’m new, but here’s another idea regarding pace.
One of the things that the Celtics defense does well it’s to force turnovers, right? In fact, it’s the one thing they do better than anyone (at least this year). So, it stands to reason that when the defense it’s working well, there are a lot of turnovers and fast breaks, and when it’s not working so well, there are less turnovers and more half court sets, right? Maybe what the weird pace numbers are saying is that the Celtics have been having trouble forcing turnovers against fast teams.

By: Jason

Jason — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 17:02:37 +0000

I want to clarify a sentence above, which should read:

“If Perk gets whistled on a few close calls on screens and the Celts suffer one or two bad bounces, the turnovers are more likely to hurt you in a smaller sample (playing at a slower pace), whereas these things will more likely even out across a greater number of possessions.”

By: Jason

Jason — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 16:58:31 +0000

Actually, I think that what T started to get at is very interesting. Having 10 more possessions a game increases the sample size of the game itself. There is no question that these Celtics are better per possession than almost every team in the league. It stands to reason that if they maximize the number of possessions in the games they play, there will be less noise in the results of the game.

A bad team playing the Celtics will be better off if the game is slow and the Celtics make a few key turnovers because they will have 8 to 12 fewer scoring chances to make up for those turnovers if the game is slowed down. If Perk gets whistled on a few close calls on screens and the Celts suffer one or two bad bounces, then those turnovers are more likely to hurt you in a smaller sample, where these things will more likely even out.

They counter is that pace is more likely to tire the stars, but I think this is somewhat overstated. It doesn’t mean the Celtics have to run the fast break to up their possessions–they can instead deliberately look for shots earlier in the shot clock.

Anyway, I think that you’re on to something here Zach in that the Celts are probably better off with more possessions against bad teams, because they bad breaks aren’t going to bite them. When they’re clearly the better team, they want to have more possessions because they are more likely to end up on top when the sample is larger.