On Portland and Indiana

[steveshea]

Portland and Indiana are getting a lot of press after impressive starts to the season. A number of possible reasons for the success have been suggested. I've read about Paul George's improvement as a player. I have read about Portland's soft schedule and unusually high shooting percentages. One thing I haven't heard yet is any reference to the amount of time the core players on these teams played together last season. The starting lineups in Ind and Por both played over 1000 minutes together last season (2nd and 3rd most minutes of any lineups in the NBA behind only OKC's first unit). Indiana brought back all starting five this season, and Portland only swapped Hickson for R. Lopez. Wouldn't this experience give these teams an edge early in the year over a team like Brooklyn that is trying to incorporate new pieces?

I was wondering if anyone has ever done a formal study of this phenomenon. That is, do teams that return a core that played a ton of time together the previous season have an edge in the early part of the following season? When is the success sustained?

I recently blogged on the subject and its relationship to the metric Lineup Entropy: http://www.basketballanalyticsbook.com/ ... n-success/

[AcrossTheCourt]

Well, here's one weird issue: returning a lot of the same players means you're closer to being the same team as last season, so they should have the same results. But early in the season? That's interesting.

Couple notes here though: I thought Indiana would be truly elite this season due to an improved bench and Hibbert not being hampered by a wrist injury (Indiana's offense was a lot better in the second half of the season.) They also had a mainly young core.

Their starting lineup, however, has been performing even better though:

+15.5 per 48 minutes compared to +11.3 last season, according to 82games.com.

Portland? I was higher on them than other teams, but one way they've outperformed expectations is they've revamped their defense -- they're great at defending three-pointers now. They tossed out JJ Hickson for a real center in the middle. For people beholden to box score stats, this shouldn't be an upgrade, but Hickson has one of the largest differences between his RAPM and his PER/Win Shares/Wins Produced. And like Indiana, they upgraded one of the worst benches in the league

[nileriver]

That definitely is an interesting concept. I would be interested to see if there is an improvement year-over-year. I wouldn't think that this necessarily would be a predictor of elite level success, but is interesting none the less.

Also, as Blazers fan, I would contribute most of the improvement to upgrading what I believe was the worst bench in the NBA last year. And as such, they do have new faces in the rotation.

[Mike G]

I am pretty sure the Blazers had the worst bench in many years, maybe in NBA history.
Meyers Leonard had PER of 12.1, Maynor was 10.6, and everyone else was <10.
Leonard had ws/48 of 0.97, Luke Babbitt had 0.47, and the rest hovered around zero or were well below.
Blazers had 4 of the league's 22 lowest WS for the year: Will Barton, Ronnie Price, Jared Jeffries, and Nolan Smith all got 300-900 minutes at negative rates.