Let's talk about Pace...

[REHawksFan]

I've mentioned pace and its impact on the Hawks in other posts but I've never seen a topic specifically addressing this, so I figured I'd start one on the day before the potential last day of the season.  Now that the regular season has concluded, I looked at the league wide data to see what the trends were regarding pace.  See chart below.  

 

For your viewing pleasure, I've color coded the chart, breaking the NBA into 3 tiers - Top 10 Pace (green means go), Bottom 10 pace (red is for slow), and the Middle 10 pace.  At the bottom are the averages.  The Top 10 teams are all at Pace: 100+ level while the bottom 10 are all Pace: <98.  The Middle 10 are basically Pace: 98-100 with Bos and LAC the exceptions at 97.98 and 97.93. Interestingly, the Top 10 has 6 Playoff / Playin teams, the Middle 10 has 7, and the Bottom 10 has 7.  So it seems pretty evenly dispersed.  However...

Wins: 

• Top10: 36.8
• Mid10: 44.5
• Bot10: 41.7 

Rating:

• Top10:  ORtg: 114.8 / DRtg: 116.4 / NetRtg: -1.6
• Mid10: ORtg: 115.5 / DRtg: 113.7 / NetRtg: +1.8
• Bot10: ORtg: 113.3 / DRtg: 113.4 / NetRtg: -0.1

So league wide, there seems to be a sweet spot in pace that is between 98 and 99 possessions per 48 minutes.  That's where teams have the best success offensively and defensively.  But what about the Hawks?  Well...

The Hawks went 36-46 this year.  They suffered numerous injuries, played with countless lineups, and featured some 6-8 G-League level players in their normal rotations throughout the year.  And yet, there's still some Pace Trend data that seems somewhat insightful (to me anyway). 

The Hawks average pace this year was 100.84 which ranked 6th in the NBA as shown above.  I have often asserted that the Hawks are at their best when they slow down and play with less pace.  I think it helps them be more efficient offensively and play better defense.  Simply put, my contention is that the Hawks playing fast is generally a disaster in terms of TOs and poor defense.  But I haven't ever studied it to see if that assertion was correct.  So here goes:  I looked at the 82 game schedule to see what, if any, trends emerged around their pace of play.  I sorted the entire season by Pace and then looked at win/loss record, ORtg, DRtg, TS%, AST%, and REB%. 

I separated the season into 3 main categories by Pace:  Pace: 100+, Pace: 98-99, and Pace: 98 or less.  Then, I also considered one subcategory which is explained below.  The chart below summarizes what I found.  

As shown above, the Hawks went 18-22 with a -3.5 Net Rating in 40 games where they played at a pace of 100 or greater.  This accounts for 50% of their wins and nearly 50% of their games.  Interestingly, of the 18 wins, only 3 were against playoff teams and another 3 against playin teams.  So 6 of 18 wins in this group are quality teams. 

In the Middle Pace group, the Hawks only played 10 games with a pace between 98 and 100.  They went 2-8 with a net rating of -6.9.  Ugly.  Not much else to say. The offense dipped while the defense got worse.  The competition was tough, however, as 7 of the 10 games were against playoff / playin teams.  

Finally, in the Bottom Pace tier (Pace: Less than 98), the Hawks played 32 games and went 16-16 with a Net Rating of +1.2.  This was BY FAR their best showing and is all the more impressive when you consider that 23 of the 32 games are against playoff / playin teams.  

So, in general, the Hawks do better when they play slower.  But you may notice the light blue line above.  I noticed in the data that the Hawks do particularly well when they play at Pace: 95 or less.  In fact, they played 19 such games all season (nearly 25% of the season) and went a remarkable 12-7 with a net rating of +5.3.  Their offensive rating would rank Top 5 in the NBA while their DRating would be Top 15.  Simply put, this was their absolute BEST play of the year, despite injuries and roster issues.  And more amazingly, of the 12 wins, 10 (TEN!!) came against playoff or playin teams. And before anyone asks, yes, Trae played in several of these 19 games.   

The last thing I'll say is this. I mentioned that I also looked at TS%, TO%, REB%, and AST% at various pace levels. The chart for that is below.  It doesn't show a huge difference between pace levels for most of these stats.  

 

Final Final thing I'll say....I'm not suggesting the Hawks commit to playing at a slow, less than 95 pace every game.  It's more that I think slowing down in general will cover up a lot of their defensive issues (which are exacerbated by playing ultra fast) and will likely lead to better offensive opportunities.  I think we see this in the League-Wide data and in the Hawks specific data.  As with everything, there's probably a happy middle ground they need to find which is not too slow and not too fast, but I tend to the believe that are is going to be much less than 100 poss / 48 minutes.  

Anyone else have thoughts on Pace and the Hawks?  

 

[NBASupes]

We always sucked playing fast since Trae been here. You gotta be exceptional in the open court and excellent in the half court to play fast like Indiana. 

Our best half court team where we were the best in the NBA or close, we had a pace in the bottom 10 but we had no open court players either. Now we got JJ who's exceptional in the open court. 

Edited April 16 by NBASupes

[theheroatl]

Pace might be a difference maker if we had a good defense. We have a terrible defense so no matter how fast we shoot the ball we will let the other team score on fast breaks and 3 pointers on the other end.

[NBASupes]

4 minutes ago, theheroatl said:

Pace might be a difference maker if we had a good defense. We have a terrible defense so no matter how fast we shoot the ball we will let the other team score on fast breaks and 3 pointers on the other end.

Pace is usually bad for defense but you can run fools off the court if your offense is that damn good. 

[JeffS17]

It feels like a lot of coaches use pace as a band-aid for roster issues they cannot solve with scheme, so it makes sense to me a lot of the faster paced teams are underperforming.  Teams that play really slow are likely leaving easy buckets on the table and not taking advantage of transition in a lot of cases, and teams that find the happy medium know when to push pace and when it settle down.  It's, of course, hard to make much of averages of averages, but that would be my summary.

 

For the Hawks, we are built to be a half court team.  Trae is tiny and not great in transition because he usually can't go to the rack himself, which makes things easier to defend.  JJ is the only real +player we have in transition imo.  We excel in half court battles because Trae can break down the defenses routinely and Clint/Hunter are significantly better when the defense is set.

[KB21]

You can be a half court-oriented team and still get into your sets and actions quickly the way Quin wants.  Quin loves to play advantage basketball on offense, and the best way to do that at times is to run your actions before the defense can really set themselves.  

[NBASupes]

20 minutes ago, KB21 said:

You can be a half court-oriented team and still get into your sets and actions quickly the way Quin wants.  Quin loves to play advantage basketball on offense, and the best way to do that at times is to run your actions before the defense can really set themselves.  

This matters if you are getting stops but when we getting stops at a good rate, we don't have Trae but that hurts our ability to get into quick sets as we don't have the personnel. 

With Trae, as long as you are getting stops, this makes sense but trying to rush without stops creates operating too fast from a disadvantage. So much is situational in what we should do

[KB21]

Historically, if you take into account what he eventually adapted his offense into while the head coach with the Utah Jazz, Quin has been able to balance out when to push the tempo and shoot early vs when to run his complex sets with ball movement, screens, blenders, and drives.  They were typically in the middle when it came to possessions per 48 minutes, but they lead the league in three-point shots with a lot of those coming early and in transition.  

[NBASupes]

2 minutes ago, KB21 said:

Historically, if you take into account what he eventually adapted his offense into while the head coach with the Utah Jazz, Quin has been able to balance out when to push the tempo and shoot early vs when to run his complex sets with ball movement, screens, blenders, and drives.  They were typically in the middle when it came to possessions per 48 minutes, but they lead the league in three-point shots with a lot of those coming early and in transition.  

A big part of this is on the PG. The gap between the Jazz with Conley v. Without was massive. Same for Rubio and the others. 

[KB21]

8 minutes ago, NBASupes said:

A big part of this is on the PG. The gap between the Jazz with Conley v. Without was massive. Same for Rubio and the others. 

What's interesting about the Jazz with Conley is that it took over a year for the combo of Conley and Mitchell to really get used to each other and find their groove.  

Utah Jazz: Donovan Mitchell and Mike Conley have found groove together – Deseret News

 

[Gray Mule]

2 hours ago, NBASupes said:

Pace is usually bad for defense but you can run fools off the court if your offense is that damn good. 

Sounds like the Atlanta Hawks when they play the Pacers!

[KB21]

Blender

Finding the three in transition.

Another three in transition.

 

[JeffS17]

28 minutes ago, KB21 said:

Blender

Finding the three in transition.

Another three in transition.

 

This first gif is exactly how I remember those Jazz teams.  Just working/exhausting defenses for better and better shots until they had a dunk/layup or open three.  There were so many good looks created in that one gif.  Gobert had a free dunk under the basket, there was a high percentage paint shot, open floater, could have side stepped a three, etc.  

[KB21]

15 minutes ago, JeffS17 said:

This first gif is exactly how I remember those Jazz teams.  Just working/exhausting defenses for better and better shots until they had a dunk/layup or open three.  There were so many good looks created in that one gif.  Gobert had a free dunk under the basket, there was a high percentage paint shot, open floater, could have side stepped a three, etc.  

That's how we played offense during the 60-win season.  

[JayBirdHawk]

Saw/Heard/Read this from last night's game:

Hawks just can't have possessions where they spend 18 seconds setting up a post up.

We can't be the 7 seconds or less Suns, or a Pacer's style track meet, but we can't be also this slow-paced team always working against set defenses. Easy buckets also needed.