dougthonus wrote:jnrjr79 wrote:Here's what would make sense to me:
If the pace you played with had no impact on performance, then better teams would want to play with more pace, because the more possessions you have, the more randomness you're taking out of the outcome by increasing the # of possessions.
But pace does has an impact on performance, so rather than being a "gimmick," it's probably more of a case-by-case thing. You're sort of viewing this as though there is some sort of inherently natural pace, and that any effort to speed things up (or, presumably, also to slow things down) constitutes "mucking up" - some sort of manipulation of the natural state of affairs. I don't really believe that. Teams have their strengths and weaknesses and should play to their strengths. If a team plays better when it plays faster, then in some sense it is "better" than its opponent if it can dictate pace and the opponent can't keep up.
Generally speaking, there is a somewhat natural pace though. Teams do not just sprint up and down the court, the game mostly involves half court possessions, and elite players are going to beat non elite players in the half court. When you have less talent, you like to make the game not about half court execution, and you try to do some tactic to change the tenor of the game.
One such tactic is to try and run people out of the gym and make the game faster and sloppier. Another such tactic might be to make the game overly bruising and physical and beat up other teams, but generally speaking, you try to change the game from half court basketball execution which is the traditional primary aspect of the game on both sides to something else where you have a relative advantage.
Interesting. League-wide pace also went up almost 10% in 10 years recently, which is a lot. (It's hard to imagine a runner getting 10% faster, for example.) There is an obvious overall coaching philosophy change recently that wasn't a tactical choice for a single team trying to hide deficiencies, but a tide that lifted all boats on the belief that it was a more ideal way to play basketball, partially due to analytics. So, there is less relative advantage in "playing faster" than there would have been in 2009, because the whole league has sped up to what I imagine is closer to some human limit. Has the "natural pace" then gone up 10%, or is everybody pushing above their natural rhythm? The latter would help explain the increase in injuries, despite load management.
"Play faster" is an interesting phrase, because you can't really run faster, it's hard to increase your footspeed. And it's hard to increase your mental processing speed. What we're talking about is largely changing your decision-making. You can get in better shape and use your top gear more often, but the top gear is largely what it was before. You can risk more turnovers by emphasizing speed over safety, passing over dribbling. And you can change your shot selection, considering early, distant shots as "good" where you would have passed them up before. Because of this, pace almost certainly increases randomness, rather than decreases it, even though more possessions would seem to decrease volatility in performance for good teams, as mentioned. I think it would be almost impossible to increase your pace without taking more chances - hit-ahead passes rather than walking the ball up, for example - and taking longer, riskier, more volatile shots. Which reminds me of Chuck saying the Warriors would never win a championship shooting that many jumpers... there was a kernel of truth in there. Quick, long shots aren't as unreliable as we used to think - but, they are still volatile. A 38% 3-point shooting team could easily shoot 25% or 50+% on a given night.
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