Flow state: a look at every game so far
Basketball is a game of ups and downs. It was great to see the Suns battle the Warriors on Christmas. We had two talented teams really go back and forth. And then there’s the Washington Wizards. Being a Wizards fan is like only ever eating Taco Bell, while the Christmas day games are like someone suddenly passing you a juicy al pastor taco on a handmade tortilla. This isn’t a bad thing on its own. If you look at any given Wizards game, part of the fun is the sense that, aside from a few matchups, the Wiz kids might get the W and maybe even do it in memorable fashion. And you can see this in the data.
Despite the occasional, ‘who are you gonna believe, the stats or your lying eyes?’ player, a lot of basketball data helps deepen my sense of what I see on any given night. One of my favorite graphs—and perhaps the simplest in-game statistic—shows score differential. If you’ve followed an NBA game online or used the Official Washington Wizards App™, there’s a game flow graph that shows the point differential between the home and away teams. When the Wizards score the graph goes up, when the other team scores, the graph goes down, and when the other team goes on a 10-0 run, the graph really goes down. You can take a look at one of these figures and immediately know what kind of game the Wizards were having. Sure, just looking at the score does this too, but point differential helps capture the feel of the game over time—those ups and those downs--in a way that the end-of-quarter score doesn’t.
I recreated this graph for every Wizards game so far this season, placing the Wizards on top (in blue) and their opponent on the bottom (in whatever color they are). Large peaks of blue on the top half of the figure suggest games where the Wizards really dominated. The season opener against Toronto or the first game against Memphis are probably the best examples of this. If you don’t remember or hadn’t tuned in to early season basketball yet, the Wizards were exciting. It was a simpler time when we all assumed Wizards General Manager Tommy Sheppard would get the “GM of the Year Award” and everyone also assumed that was an actual thing.1 You could be forgiven for spending any amount of mental energy thinking through how much vacation time you’d need to take for the championship parade.
Taking a look at this figure, it’s clear things started to turn sour at the first game against New Orleans (the first graph on the third row). While the Wizards (barely) won that game against the Pelicans, you can see from the figure that it’s one of the first games where they didn’t have much of a presence aside from their previous three losses (against Brooklyn, Atlanta, and Toronto). What I like about revisiting these figures is, unlike the box score, they really bring back the momentum (or lack thereof) of the season so far. You can see the comeback and battle with Detroit from early December. You can also see that we never stood a chance against Phoenix. The Knicks attempt to claw back is also clear, as is the great Beal-as-point guard performance against Cleveland that just finished last night before I wrote this.
A neat thing about having access to this data, though, is we can look at all of these games together, in one graph. Similar to the above, I put the Wizards on the top half of the graph with all of their opponents on the bottom half. While it is kind of noisy by design, there is one thing that is clear to me (or at least confirms what I already thought): the Wizards are really giving up a ton of shots in the second half of games. Not only does the red on the bottom half get a bit heavier, you can see quite a few dips above the -20 line.
One reason this figure is so wild looking is that it is based on data that includes the time stamp for when a shot was made.2 Shots are made almost continuously during a game, though, rather than at clean intervals.
I decided to collapse the data into clean, 60-second interval bins. This simplifies things—and shows that, on average, there is no 60-second point where the Wizards are ever ahead—but also pushes the stats toward abstraction. Basketball isn’t a game played in one-minute buckets, it’s a game of buckets (or bricks) played in 10-to-15 second possessions. The noise of the graph above, and the back-and-forth of the first figure, are part of the fun.
The value of a photo album is to have a place to turn back to when you want to revisit old memories. The game flow graphs above are kind of like a data photo album. And like those old pictures you might come across from 7th grade, they show a team very much in its awkward teenage years. Guys are trying out new identities, going through phases. I could see almost any player on the current squad playing point guard while the team is stretched for personnel. I could also see most of them playing center at some point. What a time! Everything is in flux. There’s still room to grow. Rui Hachimura and Thomas Bryant will return, we’ll make some new friends from the G-league, and maybe Tommy Sheppard will make some moves at the trade deadline in February while drinking from his official “#1 GM” coffee mug. As every Wizards fan knows, the ups and downs will continue.
I know that there actually is an NBA Executive of the Year Award, but until I read the Wikipedia entry for it to write this footnote, I could not have told you who has won it or who votes on it (spoiler: there’s no fan vote).