The NBA season is three weeks old and it’s still a little too early to make grand pronouncements about how the rest of the season and ultimately the postseason will progress. We need only cast our eyes back one season to when the Celtics took well into the new year to find the form that saw them emerge from a haze of “Should we break up this core?” recriminations to an NBA Finals berth.
But with every team except Dallas at least 10 games into their schedule, we can start to identify a few things to watch for and some trends.
Too big a burden for Luka Dončić in Big D?
The term “heliocentrism” was an accident, arising from the search for a catchy article title. But it does neatly capture one approach to the question of how much a team should lean on its star.
In recent years, teams such as the Houston Rockets, with James Harden, but more recently the Atlanta Hawks, with Trae Young, and the Dallas Mavericks, with Luka Dončić, have given those individuals burdens with no precedent.
The theory is easy to understand: shot creation is one of the most expensive skills in the NBA in terms of both salary and trade assets needed to acquire. For a team blessed with a player who can do a ton of creation, why not lean into that and “min-max” the rest of the roster full of complementary offensive/high-defensive impact pieces? It makes sense and has been unquestionably effective. How well this approach translates to consistent postseason success is another question. One doesn’t want to read too much into a small sample of series against a historical juggernaut such as the Warriors teams that defeated, first, Harden’s Rockets and more recently Dončić’s Mavs.
But those teams did fall short of the finals, and over the years I’ve become increasingly convinced that the “one man does it all” approach is if not a doomed approach, but also at least a highly suboptimal one with regards to reaching an ultimate goal of winning a championship. At a certain point, the benefits of additional playmakers in terms of both offensive variety and reducing the effects of cumulative fatigue upon a single star become hard to ignore.
It’s become more than a cliché to compare the Hawks to the Mavericks ever since Young and Dončić swapped places on draft day in 2018, but the two make for an interesting study in different approaches. The Hawks certainly operated as if they needed to find Young a more capable deputy in acquiring Dejounte Murray, while the Mavs lost Jalen Brunson in the offseason, putting even more on Luka’s plate.
However, the results have been good! The Mavs are 6-3 and have the league’s second-most-efficient offense so far. So why am I worried?
Looking just at the second halves of games, they are 11th in offense, and in 4th quarters, they are ninth in offense with a negative point differential. That mark looks worse when removing the 13-point edge they had in the 4th in a 41-point win over Memphis, the only blowout in which they’ve played this season. In each of the first three quarters of games, Dončić’s True Shooting Percentage is well over 60 percent. In the 4th? It’s 50.0 percent on the dot thus far.
Combine this with the career-long pattern that has seen Dončić’s scoring acumen decline markedly in the second halves of games where he had enormous first-half usage and I start to get concerned. Add in that Dončić is flirting with the largest single-season self-creation burden of the tracking data era — he is taking 29.3 self-created attempts compared to Harden’s all-time high of 29.8/100 in 2018-19, and the concern turns to anxiety.
That this style has been effective in terms of winning games, largely close ones, might be the biggest worry of all. Teams adjust far more readily to wins and losses than they do to process concerns.
For example, over the last 10 postseasons, teams have made changes to their starting lineups between games in a series around 19.8 percent of the time. However, teams that won the last game did so for only 11.7 percent of games compared to 27.9 percent for teams that lost. To some degree, this is expected, but the “wait until we lose one” move is a time-honored playoff tradition. It’s not obvious on a surface level how the Mavs should address this concern — without Brunson the roster is pretty bare of anyone capable of diffusing Luka’s responsibilities — but past experience tells us they won’t really try until they stop getting away with it.
By that time it’s usually too late.
Offensive Efficiency Pinball
Through Monday’s games, the NBA as a whole is scoring 112.4 points per game, ninth-highest scoring average of all time, and highest since 1969-70 when teams averaged around 10 more shot attempts and 10 more free throw attempts per game than they do today. The 111.9/100 Offensive Rating would be the third-highest efficiency recorded since the stat became trackable in 1973-74, according to Basketball Reference. That ranking possibly undersells the degree of the explosion.
The first few weeks of the season generally see the least efficient offense league-wide. Over the last 20 years, ORTG has risen by around 2 points/100 from this point, roughly 150 games in, to the final overall season average. If that trend holds, 2022-23 would obliterate the previous record of 112.3/100 set in 2020-21. Unlike that season, we have not seen the outlier 3-point shooting accuracy that characterized the empty-arena portion of the 2020-21 season, with 35.7 percent overall and 38.1 percent on uncontested 3s being well within the normal range and more than a point -and-a-half lower than the crowdless period of 2020-21.
What’s going on?
Earlier in the season, Kevin Pelton noted that both the free throw-and-possession resulting from the new “take foul” rules and the increase in transition chances resulting from players adjusting and no longer stifling fast breaks in the backcourt have driven some of the increase. But only some.
Other differences include a slight rebalancing of shot selection away from the arc and towards the paint. Last season around 44 percent of attempts were taken inside the key compared to 38 percent from deep. Thus far in 2022-23, 46 percent of attempts have been in the paint compared to “only” 37 percent attempted from beyond the arc. While there has been no change in between the last campaign and this in terms of overall eFG%, more shots being attempted in the paint does go hand in hand with more offensive rebounds (24.5 OREB% would be the highest since 2014-15) and free throw rate where only one intervening season since 2010-11 has seen a larger FTA/FGA ratio than this year’s .209.
Will this season indeed follow normal trends, resulting in a season-long ORTG in the 114s or even 115s? Who can say for sure? I will note that qualitatively a number of veteran teams have seemed a touch slow defensively in the early going and I could easily see many of them round into normal form. Perhaps the first normal length offseason since the beginning of the pandemic has lent some early benefit to teams with young legs?
I’ll be the first to admit I wasn’t high on Bennedict Mathurin as a draft prospect. This was less about his performance at Arizona, per se, than being a skeptic of the player archetype of the mid-sized wing who was a shooter-scorer in college. Too many things can go wrong in terms of the shot not translating, NBA size or quickness being a little too much to create one’s own shot, or simply not being able to stay in front of anyone defensively. Being a wing creator is a tough row to hoe in the NBA, and too often these players end up as rather one-dimensional chuckers — Terrence Ross being a good outcome in this aspect — or inefficient stat pads on middling-to-poor teams.
The key question is often “Can you get easy points?” with the two surest ways to do so involving becoming either a lights-out deep shooter or having the ability to consistently get to the basket, or, more pertinently, to the line. It’s a little too early to tell about Mathurin as a shooter, but hitting 25 of his first 62 (40.3 percent) 3-pointers isn’t exactly a bad sign.
What puts him in lofty company has been the frequency with which he gets to the stripe. In the last 20 seasons, only two rookies have attempted at least 10 free throws per 100 team possessions, according to Basketball-Reference.com: Blake Griffin and Dončić. Thus far, Mathurin is yuuust on the border of joining that club, at 9.8 FTA/100, a touch behind Luka’s 10.1/100. Of course, he is only in second place among them this season’s rookies, sitting behind Paolo Banchero (11.5 FTA/100 puts him fractionally behind Griffin’s rookie year), but you don’t need me to tell you the Magic forward has had a great start.
Expanding out a little more broadly, here are the next 12 names after Mathurin’s in terms of rookie FTA/100 over the past 20 years, in descending order:
It’s a great list to be on! Continuing at this level for the rest of the season could be a challenge, and the presence of Evans and (until last year) Wiggins illustrates that this grouping is not a foolproof predictor of stardom. But the ability to draw fouls is important in terms of setting a high floor for Mathurin’s efficiency going forward.
In sharp contrast to the No. 6 pick are two players who have struggled to start the season, in part because of their continued inability to get freebies at the stripe. Before the season, Fred Katz discussed RJ Barrett’s own recognition of the importance of foul drawing, and indeed the fourth-year Knicks wing’s strong second half to last season was built in part upon a renewed emphasis on it. Nine of his 16 career games with 10 or more free throw attempts came in the second half of last season, a mark he has not achieved yet this season as his FTA/100 has dipped from a strong 8.4/100 to a near career-low. 5.8/100.
Without that larger helping of points from the line, even career-bests in terms of rim finishing and free throw percentage haven’t been able to overcome his slow start to the season from a jump-shooting perspective. According to NBA.com tracking data, Barrett is 21-for-72 (29.2 percent) on attempts outside of 10 feet on the year. So even as the addition of Brunson has enabled a healthier shot diet — a sizable chunk of Barrett’s attempts have moved from midrange areas closer to the basket, boosting his accuracy on 2-pointers a career-high-by-some-distance 50.5 percent — Barrett has not made much progress towards becoming an above-average efficiency scorer.
Meanwhile, among many issues with the Timberwolves during Minnesota’s disappointing 5-6 start, the play of Anthony Edwards looms large. Much has been made of the awkwardness of the fit between Edwards, Karl-Anthony Towns and Rudy Gobert, but Edwards is getting to the rim at a career-best rate and his finishing once he gets there has been at his normal level.
What he isn’t doing is getting fouled, averaging a career-low 5.1 FTA/100. He has never been a prolific foul-drawer, which, much like Barrett, renders his efficiency subject to the vicissitudes of jump-shooting variance. With things not quite flowing as Minny would like, a few more chances to get some easy points on the board would do nicely.
(Photo of Luka Dončić: Ron Jenkins/Getty Images)
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