So Your Team Played at a Faster Pace This Preseason

Oct 20, 2014; Brooklyn, NY, USA; Philadelphia 76ers shooting guard Elliot Williams (25) controls the ball against Brooklyn Nets point guard Deron Williams (8) during the second quarter at Barclays Center. Mandatory Credit: Brad Penner-USA TODAY Sports

Preseason results don’t matter all that much. This is something that seems to be understood in most circles, and statistical evidence suggests that exhibition results don’t tell us a great deal at the player or team performance level. That doesn’t mean the month-long exercise is useless, just that the preseason represents a largely imperfect and small sample from which to evaluate.

Like with preseason results, preseason narratives probably don’t matter all that much.

Team X wants to get out and run. Oh, word? So has every team in every preseason ever, or so it seems.

With a couple of years worth of preseason team data now available, the picture of whether any preseason tempo changes take hold in the regular season is becoming more clear. Pace data exists for the 2010-11, 2012-13, and 2013-14 preseasons (2011-12 has been excluded since teams only played two preseason games), and those numbers can be compared to regular season pace, as well as changes in pace year-over-year.

It’s still just 90 team preseason-season sets, but here’s a look at how those numbers relate:

With an R-squared of .4894, preseason pace can explain almost half of the variance in a team’s regular season pace. As it turns out, the pace a team plays at in the preseason definitely gives us a window into how they’ll play in the regular season. (For reference, year-to-year pace alone only had a .35 R-squared in this sample.)

Last preseason, the Philadelphia 76ers fired a warning salvo that they’d be playing at a breakneck pace, averaging over 104 possessions per preseason game. In the regular season, they topped the league with 99.2 possessions per game, a strategy that made perfect sense given their relative lack of talent, and one that will surely hold again this coming season.

The Sixers once again averaged 100-plus possessions in the preseason, trailing only the guard-heavy Phoenix Suns. The Cleveland Cavaliers, meanwhile, played at a glacial pace.

The Suns and Cavaliers are more interesting cases than the 76ers. The 76ers are already an up-tempo team, but Phoenix played faster (they were “just” eighth in pace last year) and the Cavs appear to have slowed down. The Lakers went from a top-tempo team in the regular season to a bottom-10 one in the preseason.

If preseason pace explains 49 percent of the variance in regular season pace, maybe it helps to identify changes in pace, too. To find out, the changes in year-over-year pace were compared to changes in the preseason. That is, did a jump in pace in the preseason come with a resulting jump in pace in the regular season?

As it turns out, changes in pace have slightly more noise involved. That could be in part because the preseason is played at a faster pace than the regular season:

Another way to look, then, is to regularize pace by the environment pace, scoring it on a 100-scale similar to OPS+ in baseball. A pace of 100 would then mean a league-average pace.

It seems as if the best way to use preseason pace data may just be as a proxy for actual in-season pace, not a measure of potential pace changes, either as a raw rate or relative to the league’s overall pace.

In any case, here are how 2014-15 preseason paces differed from the regular season last year. The data suggests more context than just preseason pace is needed, so search for team context clues that may underlie a change in style and pace of play.