The 2019 NBA Playoffs have been excellent, with teams playing at their absolute best. We’ve seen teams like the Warriors and the Bucks absolutely dominate, but how have these teams, along with other teams, changed their playmaking strategies? For instance, if we look at the Bucks in the Playoffs, they have clearly decided to have Giannis drive into the paint more and pass out less. This is because Giannis’s attempts in the paint generate more points per shot (field goal percentage multiplied by two) than a typical three-point shooter does.
However, the Bucks employed a different strategy from other teams in the playoffs. For instance, we know that the Denver Nuggets’ whole strategy depended on Nikola Jokic. However, it wasn’t just his extraordinary scoring ability that made Jokic so great. Instead, it was his ability to make plays and get his teammates points that allowed the Nuggets to win games. Thus, we saw the Nuggets embrace this strategy.
I expressed this idea of teams looking for playmaking with a simple statistic: Points from Assists, adjusted for usage-rate inflation. This stat captures two things:
- Pass quality: If players don’t pass well, their passes won’t translate into points.
- Pass volume: If players don’t pass often, they won’t generate many points from assists.
I then graphed these players to see how teams generally change their strategies around passing and playmaking.
In the graph above, the red line represents a player whose points from assists does not change in the playoffs. The line of best fit has a slope of about 0.79 with an R^2 of 0.65, showing that points from assists were generally lower in the playoffs for this sample.
Although we saw (in my previous post) that teams typically use important players at similar rates in the playoffs and regular season, this result suggests that those players generated fewer points from assists in the playoffs. The analysis is descriptive, so it does not tell us whether this came from a deliberate strategic change or other differences between playoff and regular-season games.
Steph Curry was an exception, creating more points from assists in the playoffs than in the regular season.