Pace is the new buzz word in the NBA

The Washington Wizards have a weapon that no one else in the league has. Deploying that weapon is the difficult part for Randy Wittman though. And so he opted to make a major change entering the 2015 season.

Never mind the Wizards have reached the second round of the playoffs in back-to-back years for the first time since back-to-back Finals trips in 1978 and 1979. Never mind all the success this team has had. They needed to change to get more out of their supreme talent in John Wall.

Wall’s speed is legendary in the league. He is probably the one or two players no defender wants to see heading at them at full speed in transition. And now Wittman wants his team to speed up? This was a team that criminally did not use Wall’s speed, finishing 16th in pace (possessions per 48 minutes) last season and 19th the year before. This was a team that tried to constrain Wall into the half court.

Still, the Wizards could unleash Wall in the half court with their new philosophy, a blinding blur running off screens at his breakneck speed and putting pressure on defenses. The Wizards now lead the league in pace, entering Monday’s game, at 104.2 possessions per 48 minutes. It is an incredible transformation for a team that was struggled to get the ball up the floor quickly and use that incredible weapon they have in the two-time All Star Wall.

“The main thing is everybody is going to get shots in the system,” Wall said after the Wizards’ season opening 88-87 win over the Orlando Magic, a game with a pace of “just” 101.4. “We just have to do a better job of moving the ball faster. At times, we held the ball a little long and we were getting a little too sloppy. But when you are moving the ball and guys are executing like we were in the preseason, we can score the ball a lot. If you are missing shots, you can deal with it. Some guys weren’t making shots, but they still committed themselves on the other end and that is what helped us win the game.”

The Wizards are still struggling to get things completely down. They are sitting at .500 this year with a slightly below average offensive rating at 99.5 points per 100 possessions. The increased pace has not and does not mean an effective offense. Speeding things up to force the defense to collapse and think quickly sounds good theoretically. But pace does not automatically make wins. The faster teams are often poor defensively (the Wizards are in the bottom 10 in defensive rating entering Monday’s games).

The pace revolution the Wizards are emblematic of though is not limited to them. The league saw the Wizards’ offensive pace revolution coming — the team was fifth in pace and first in offensive rating in the preseason, for whatever that is worth — but no one saw what the Wizards’ increase in pace would mean for the rest of the league.

Then again, the Golden State Warriors seem to have changed everything with their championship win too. The league is a copycat league. The stretch-4 has become vogue. Teams are giving their guards the entire paint to drive into. And now teams are trying to mimic everything the Warriors did.

And since they cannot get Stephen Curry on their team, teams are doing it in one major way — pace.

In the early NBA season, pace is up throughout the league. The median pace in the league entering Monday’s games is 99.3 possessions per 48 minutes. That median pace would be the second fastest pace in the league in 2015. The median for the 2015 season was 96.1, for 2014 season was 95.9, for 2013 was 94.2.

There are currently 14 teams with a pace faster than 100 possessions per 48 minutes. there was just one such team last year — those champion Warriors. It might be early an early season outlier. The numbers may settle some. But the trend has become more than apparent.

Even one of the “slowest” teams in the league by pace this year, the Utah Jazz, find a way to pick up the pace when they can. The team with the supposed slowest pace in the league, the Milwaukee Bucks at 94.6 possessions per 48 minutes, have players that get the heart pumping in transition with Giannis Antetokounmpo and Michael Carter-Williams, both players more suited to playing in transition rather than in the half court.

“It’s interesting with pace because there is nothing positive associated with being slow,” Utah Jazz head coach Quin Snyder said. “When you say something is slow, we don’t see how that’s great. But pace, a slower pace in this sense, isn’t bad. It’s like a team in football that runs the football. You don’t have as many possessions, but if you have a running game, you run the football. I wouldn’t say it’s fashionable to play with pace, I’d say it’s effective. You get better shots and better opportunities at times. For us, we’re not focused on playing slow, we’re focused on getting high percentage shots. The way that our team is made up, sometimes that involves grinding it out in the half court at times.”

Snyder’s Jazz team certainly fit that supposed ball-control style. With Rudy Gobert anchoring one of the best defenses in the league and an offense hat has its own struggles to score, limiting possessions is a good strategy. Team naturally slow down when they play a team with better defense like the Jazz. But pace does not end with possessions per 48 minutes. The traditional notion of pace is only a symbol of how the game has begun to change.

Snyder came to the Jazz talking about playing with pace. At the beginning of last season, Snyder spoke about playing with pace to mean shortening the time between actions. Snyder wanted his team to work the shot clock down, but to do so by getting over the mid-court line quicker and initiating the offense sooner. He wanted to build pace by cutting faster and moving faster into the next cut or the next screen or the next drive.

“We look at the pace numbers that the league calls pace number and then we look at the pace within our offense,” said Orlando Magic coach Scott Skiles, long a coach characterized by his offense’s penchant to pound the ball into the floor. “Utah is an example, takes the shot clock down, they go deep into the clock, but they play with tremendous pace. They are constantly moving, cutting, everything they do is sharp. There are two ways to look at that. Our goal is to do both. Our goal is we want to have a high pace up and down the floor but then also within our offense, be moving with pace.”

In other words, the league is moving faster and faster. And even the coaches who would seem to prefer a slower, more methodical offense are seeing the benefits of sharper, faster cutting, stretching the defense for long periods.

Teams like the Warriors with the constant yo-yoing rhythm of Stephen Curry’s dribbling or the Hawks and Spurs with their precise but more methodical cutting and read-and-react system. Nowadays even the most regimented offensive systems are played much faster.

There is no such thing as a team that crawls — except Memphis’ seemingly antiquated Grit and Grind style. Pace and space is more than just a descriptor for the Warriors’ rip-it offense. It is the new thing in the NBA. And everyone is getting into it. And with the emphasis on speed and length throughout the NBA these days, who could blame teams for trying to wring every little bit of pace out of each possession and each game.