Basketball Bytes: Who's Stepping Up In The NBA Cup?
Plus, the semifinalist Hawks play to the level of the competition.
Welcome to Basketball Bytes — a weekly NBA column in which I point out several byte-sized pieces of information that jumped out to me from my various basketball spreadsheets. If you’ve noticed a Basketball Byte of your own, email me and I’ll feature it in a future column!
🏀 NBA Cupgrades
We’re almost done with the second edition of the In-Season Tournament NBA Cup, and I still don’t quite know how to feel about it. It simultaneously seems like a contrived, made-for-TV event with manufactured stakes… yet also is capable of producing crazy finishes with plenty of intensity. (Steve Kerr certainly seemed to care about the way his Warriors were eliminated from the quarterfinals on Wednesday night.) The weird courts and confusing format will feel normal with enough iterations over time, but for now it’s still partly intriguing and partly an annoying corporate event.
Having said all of that, we’re down to the semifinals in Las Vegas this weekend, featuring a strange mix of teams in the Final Four. The NBA forecast model thinks this is the Thunder’s cup to lose, with OKC claiming almost as much tournament win probability as the other three remaining teams combined:
But we can’t count out the resurgent-again Bucks, the rising Rockets and the confusing Hawks (more on them below). Milwaukee has played to a location-adjusted1 points per game differential 12.0 PPG better in the NBA Cup than all other games, and Atlanta isn’t far behind at +9.5. (Houston and OKC, meanwhile, have played nearer to their normal levels in the Cup.)
One of the things that makes these NBA Cup games interesting is that, as sporadically inserted as they are into the regular season (amidst contests that don’t count toward the Cup), they provide a chance for different players to shine than those who usually excel night-in and night-out.
That’s why, for this week’s column, I thought it might be interesting to look at which players have been better during NBA Cup games than in all of his team’s other games so far this season. The metric I’ll be using is NBA.com’s PIE% (Player Impact Estimate), a stat that I think is… OK, not amazing. But since I don’t have Estimated RAPTOR broken out at the game level, and Basketball-Reference’s game finder tool lacks the ability to flag in-season tournament games yet,2 we sort of have to use what NBA Advanced Stats gives us — and that means looking at players who increased their PIE% the most in the Cup.
Overall, the leaders — with a minimum of 50 minutes in the NBA Cup and 200 in non-Cup games — were Phoenix’s Mason Plumlee (with a PIE% of 16.0 in the Cup versus 7.8 otherwise), New Orleans’ Jeremiah Robinson-Earl (15.3 versus 7.4) and Charlotte’s Tidjane Salaün (12.2 versus 4.4). But the real players I want to highlight are the ones whose teams are still active in the semifinals:
Interestingly, given how OKC’s overall PPG differential is actually slightly down in the NBA Cup from their usual lofty performance, a Thunder player still ranks No. 1 on our list of Cup overperformers: fifth-year 3-and-D guard Isaiah Joe, who checks in ahead of a host of less-surprising Atlanta and Milwaukee players.
Joe is a good all-around player anyway, with a +1.2 Estimated RAPTOR (+0.3 offense, +0.9 defense) this season after posting a +0.9 mark last year. But Joe has been scoring and assisting more, with more 3s and a far better plus/minus, in the NBA Cup than the standard OKC game. Joe’s story is somewhat typical of the guys leading the list above: Many tend to be solid-if-unspectacular players under normal circumstances, but they have delivered more in the games earmarked for the in-season tourney.
There are certainly some stars as well — my favorite player, SGA, has elevated his PIE% in these games, including the 39-point, 8-rebound clinic he put on Dallas to knock out the Mavs earlier this week. And Cup time seems to be Dame Time too, with Lillard raising his game in the tourney. I was somewhat surprised that Bucks teammate Giannis Antetokounmpo ticked slightly down, seeing as he owns two of the three highest-scoring games of the Cup so far… though that’s another example of a great player playing well regardless of the stage.
How predictive is any of this going forward? Given the disjointed nature of the NBA Cup schedule, I remain skeptical that we can really glean meaningful trends from these types of splits. But it’s for certain that the teams whose best players maintained their usual form — and whose role players stepped up — are the ones who are still vying for that in-season title. In that sense, it’s just like the playoffs, or any other championship-style format.
🏀 The Hawks Are as Good (Or Bad) as They Wanna Be
Based on the odds chart above — or the Cup-versus-not PPG differential split, for that matter — it’s clear that Atlanta is the biggest upstart among the in-season tourney’s Final Four. That was underscored even more when Trae Young and company continued to antagonize the Knicks, eliminating the one team that I have always steadfastly believed is destined to win the NBA Cup.3
But maybe we shouldn’t have been so surprised that Atlanta has raised its game in these tournament contests. After all, no team has played to the level of their competition more this season than the Hawks.
We can see this through a couple of lenses: The simpler one just looks at splits in a team’s winning percentage based on the pregame Elo ratings of its opponents. Atlanta wins at a clip 7.1 percentage points higher against teams whose Elo ratings are above league average (57.1 percent) than below average (50.0 percent), the NBA’s third-biggest split in that direction — trailing only the Rockets (+13.5) and Pacers (+9.7).
The more complicated statistical method conducts a logistic regression on a team’s chance of winning its games based on the (location-adjusted) strength of its opponents, tracking the coefficient for each team — which measures how much the team's chances of winning change as the quality of their opponents increases. A larger coefficient indicates that a team is more likely to outperform expectations against tougher opponents.
And notably, Atlanta not only has the highest coefficient in the league, but it is also the only team with a positive coefficient, suggesting they consistently rise to the challenge of stronger competition.
(Incidentally, the Lakers are the anti-Hawks: They clean up against bad opponents but can’t beat good ones at all. But that — and maybe an investigation into LeBron James’ decline 😬😬😬 — is a story for another post.)
But anyway, these are the same Hawks who can beat the Celtics, Cavs (twice) and Knicks (twice) while also losing to the Wizards (twice!), Blazers, Pistons and Bulls (twice). So you never truly know what you’re going to get out of them — and that universe of possibilities includes going on a run in the NBA Cup.
Filed under: NBA, Basketball, Basketball Bytes
Using a simple home-court adjustment of 3.5 PPG in each game.
I’m sure they will add this eventually. (Hint, hint.)
Simply because it would be hilarious for the Knicks, who haven’t won a real title since 1973, to go around trumpeting the championship of this made-up in-season tourney.