Does Pace Equal how fast a team style is?

[timdunkit]

Pace is defined as the number of possession of a team has for 48 minutes. Most people will casually throw it out as the means to how fast a team plays or not. But does it really mean that? Pace usually does correlate well with how fast a team plays but I don't think it can give you an idea how fast a team plays. Right now in the league, most teams play somewhere between 90-98 possesions for 48 minutes. How much seconds does that equate for possession?

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Pace       Secs Per Possesion
90                 16
91                 15.82
92                 15.65
93                 15.48
94                 15.32
95                 15.16
96                 15
97                 14.85
98                 14.69

The difference between a team that would be usually considered slow vs fast is about 1.31 seconds a possession. Does that really tell you that one team is going faster then the other? Of course one could argue that over time it adds and it does. But how much does 5-6 more possesions make one team slow and the other fast? What if a team forced more TO's or made more TO's wouldn't there pace be higher? What about halfcourt teams that take a lot of quick shots? Things like that are never accounted for.

The biggest piece of evidence for that Pace is misused by most fans is if you look in history. Here is a chart since basketball-reference.com recorded pace.



Now if were to use pace as equal to the speed a team plays then there are somethings that wouldn't make sense. From the 70's till right up to the 90's every single team in the league was pretty much playing uptempo (or the majority). So there was no half court teams? For 20 years, had the league average above that of the SSOL suns who are considered the best running team of our time (or most exciting) yet they fail in comparison to some of the teams we've seen in the past. In fact if pace = the speed a team played with, the Bird Celtics were more of a running team then the Suns team (i.e. in 85 when they won, the Celtics played with a pace of 101 ... the Suns never touched that in there prime years).

I think pace is one indicator that a team plays uptempo but its more of a correlation rather then a cause and effect relationship. There are aberrations that don't add up and variables that are miscounted. Pace shouldn't be used to equate to how fast a team plays ...

[montestewart]

One reason the fastest paced teams are so close to the slowest paced teams is that they play in the same league, that is, they all play the same teams and each game is a combination of the paces the two teams prefer. Various league-wide trends in shooting, defense, etc. would also have a widespread effect that a team wanting to play a particularly fast or slow pace could not avoid.

The Celtics were generally in the bottom half as far as pace, in a sense bucking the relatively fast-paced trend in the league at the time. Were they not playing against fast-paced teams like the Lakers or the Suns of the time, they would have an even lower pace factor number. They were so good because they could make fast-paced teams adjust to their pace while at the time time picking up their own pace somewhat when they needed to do so. The Suns of recent years are a faster-paced team than the Celtics of the 80s, but they play in a slower-paced league, so their numbers are lower. If the entire league consisted of teams identical to these two models, those fashioned after the Suns would likely have a significantly higher pace number than those fashioned after the Celtics.