Title: So Your Team Played at a Faster Pace This Preseason
Date: October 28, 2014
Original Source: Nylon Calculus
Synopsis: This article tried to determine if preseason changes in pace of play meant anything for teams once the regular season began.
Preseason results don’t matter all that much. This is something that seems to be understood in most circles, and statistical evidence suggests that exhibition results don’t tell us a great deal at the player or team performance level. That doesn’t mean the month-long exercise is useless, just that the preseason represents a largely imperfect and small sample from which to evaluate.
Like with preseason results, preseason narratives probably don’t matter all that much.
Team X wants to get out and run. Oh, word? So has every team in every preseason ever, or so it seems.
With a couple of years worth of preseason team data now available, the picture of whether any preseason tempo changes take hold in the regular season is becoming more clear. Pace data exists for the 2010-11, 2012-13, and 2013-14 preseasons (2011-12 has been excluded since teams only played two preseason games), and those numbers can be compared to regular season pace, as well as changes in pace year-over-year.
Continue reading at Nylon Calculus.
Blake Murphy Sports Writing 