The Cavs clawed their way to a 113-101 road victory over the Pistons tonight. Much as the team had to endure the persistent attack and scrappiness of the Pistons themselves, I found myself struggling to endure the persistent idiocy and homer-ism of Detroit’s local announce team. (Among other tics, their play-by-play announcer loves to refer to, say, 6:45 left in the quarter as “6 and 45 left”; refuses to call Mo anything other than “Maurice”; and complains about calls / no calls more than any commentator this side of Quinn Buckner.)
Aside from a petty means of venting, I bring up the announcers because they pulled out one of my all-time least favorite ideas in the final minute of playing time: the notion that the final score of the game will not indicate how closely played the game really was.
On the one hand, it’s hard to dispute the logic. Prior to the final minutes of the 4th quarter, the Cavs never opened up a lead larger than 7 points (to my recollection)—and even when they managed to get that much separation, it was extremely short-lived. To their credit, the Pistons fought hard from the opening tip tonight, much as they did a couple of weeks ago in the Q. Any time it looked like the Cavs were on the verge of blowing the game open for good, Detroit immediately went on a little burst to pull the score even. For non-partisan basketball fans, it would’ve been a fun game to watch for about 45 minutes and 30 seconds of game clock.
Down the stretch, though, the Cavs completely out-executed the Pistons and won the game by a more-than-comfortable margin of 12 points. In that sense, the back-and-forth struggle of the previous 3.5+ quarters is completely immaterial, and the Pistons’ announcer couldn’t be more off-base with his assertion that the score won’t indicate the competitiveness of the game. Yes, the Pistons fought hard and played well…but when the game was really, truly on the line, the Pistons got rolled by the Cavs, and a double digit loss couldn’t be more justified.
This ‘scoreboard fallacy’ has a close relative that also gets used frequently in the sports world: the idea that a team is “better (or worse) than their record.” This past football season was the first time I actually heard someone of authority dispute this idea. (I believe it was Bill Belichick, though I’m not completely certain. I heard it from the Sunday Night Football announcers, not the source himself.) Belichick’s* response to this idea was simple: no team is EVER better or worse than their record indicates, because the only thing that ultimately matters is who actually wins the game. Individual stats, team stats, effort level—all of those things go out the window, because what decides playoff seeding and championships is wins vs losses, period.
To be completely fair, there are maybe three circumstances that I could say counter-act this idea. One would be if a team made major mid-season personnel moves; another would be if a major player or players returned after missing significant time due to injury; the last would be if the team began the season as a very young team that has since matured considerably and can do things in the second half of the season that they couldn’t in the first. But by and large, I love the notion that the team’s record is the truest representation of their quality.
We’ve written many columns about why teams have won or lost a particular game. Statistical aberrations, dumb luck plays, the way the game is officiated—all of these elements can come into play and be seen as the deciding factor in a tight contest. But the tell-tale sign of any team that has a serious chance at a championship is composure down the stretch. Bad teams don’t have it, and no matter how hard or how well they play for the first 98% of the game, they are rarely able to hold it together enough in that final 2% to come away with an upset. Tonight, the 23-45 Pistons were no different. As a result, they lost by a wide berth.
The reality is that winning a game for 46 or 47 minutes means absolutely nothing. Yes, basketball is incredibly complicated, incredibly rich, incredibly fascinating for an incredible number of reasons. But in the final analysis, every game is ultimately a binary event: 1 or 0, up or down, win or lose. As they’ve done repeatedly this season, the Cavs didn’t play their best, didn’t always seem engaged…but figured out a way to win a game that a lesser team would’ve been okay with conceding. It’s not a statistical measure of the team’s quality in and of itself, but the mental toughness and the pride it took to win tonight—and ultimately, to win handily—is a great indicator of why this Cavs team has a true chance to be there at the end when the dust settles.
Oh, and despite what Piston-defenders might say or write, the Cavs won by double digits, and there’s nothing about the Pistons’ performance that changes that fact.
Cavs get the Pacers at home Wednesday. Keep an eye on Danny Granger’s FG%. Ought to be grisly.
-T
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