Since his first press conference as Cavaliers coach, Byron Scott has been promising that under his management, the team will play at a faster pace than we in Cleveland are used to seeing. With 6 contests of the 2010-11 season in the books, I wanted to see how his pledge is holding up so far.
*Usual Mesa Disclaimer: we are dealing with an EXTREMELY small sample size, so use caution in drawing any kind of grand conclusions based on these numbers*
Via our friends at Hoopdata, we find that thus far the Cavs are averaging 97.1 possessions per 48 minutes. (In other words, per regulation game). The league average so far this season? 97.0 possessions per game. Fittingly, then, the Cavs are currently ranked 16th in the league in this category.
Doesn’t exactly seem like Byron Scott is living up to his promise to make the Cavs a running team, does it?
When presented like that, it doesn’t. But in fact, Scott is making a pronounced difference in this facet of the game. To understand just how much of a difference, we need some context from the 2009-10 season.
In the final year of the LeBron era, the Coldstone Cavaliers averaged 93.4 possessions per 48 minutes. Unless you’re a true stat head, a difference of 3.6 possessions per 48 may not seem like much. In reality, though, it’s a huge gap. At a 93.4 pace factor, the Cavs ranked 27th in the league.
Furthermore, the league as a whole played significantly slower in 2009-10 than they have so far in 2010-11. Case in point: the league average in this category in 2009-10 was a 95.1 pace factor—a -2.0 possessions per 48 minutes difference from the young 2010-11 season.
To really drive the point home, if the Cavs had played as fast for the entire 2009-10 season as they have played so far this year, they would have finished as the 6th fastest team in the league. The 2009-10 Denver Nuggets ranked 5th in pace at 97.4, a mere +0.3 possessions per 48 minutes faster than this season’s Cavs. Phoenix—for so long the gold standard of running basketball—finished 4th at 97.6, just +0.5 possessions per 48 minutes faster than the 2010-11 Cavs.
A margin of 0.5 possessions per 48 minutes is somewhat significant, but not catastrophically huge. There are multiple places in the the 2009-10 pace ranking where 0.5 is the difference between adjacent ranks, e.g. between #15 Toronto and #16 LA Clippers, or between the #10 Knicks and the #11 Bulls. To put the scale in perspective, the difference between the fastest paced team in 2009-10 (Golden State) and the slowest paced (Portland) was a full 13.0 possessions per 48 minutes. That, ladies and gentlemen, is a chasm.
So far, then, Byron Scott is actually holding true to his word, even if this season’s current rankings show the team at the middle of the pack. Whether or not the rest of the league continues to play at a faster average pace is something that remains to be seen. But I am relatively convinced that the Cavs will continue to, as Chuck Barkley has advised for years, speed up the tempo. If the average pace throughout the league does indeed drop—as I think it is likely to do for a variety of reasons—and the Cavs keep running, they very well may finish the season looking much speedier than both the Coldstone Cavaliers and the NBA as a whole.
-T.
