Goink Home: Why Did the Atlanta Hawks Fail?

As the NBA Finals close out and the heated summer trade and free agent season draws nearer, it’ll be time for 29 teams to think about their failures and what they did wrong. It’s a harsh assessment, and it’s a short-term one too. If you fail once, the critiques rush forward like an avalanche. Maybe it may not seem important to comment on this line of thinking, but millions of dollars are moved around and careers changed because of how front offices deal with goals and playoff success. And we often have the wrong frame of reference to make these decisions.

The Myth of Jump-shooting Teams

There’s this infamous myth getting paraded around that jump-shooting teams, or simply teams that rely on three-pointers, don’t win championships. Taking issue with that statement isn’t about an old-school/analytics schism and it’s not about attacking popular media figures just for the sake of it. The problem is that these claims are made with no proof and with an apparently warped view of recent history. I don’t understand how anyone could watch the last few NBA Finals and think outside shooting isn’t important. Dallas won with a jump-shooting big man who preferred the high post and the three-point line to the low-post. Miami won twice with a pace-and-space approach where they remade Bosh into a three-point shooter and often used Shane Battier as the power forward. The Spurs won with an offense structured around driving, passing, and shooting. Now we have the Warriors, led by the three-point king Stephen Curry, on the brink of a title. Even if they lose, the Cavaliers actually had a higher rate of three-pointers per field goal attempt and it’s been one of their most successful weapons so far in the NBA Finals.

One problem with an argument lacking facts, is that opinions get mired in pre-conceived notions and people observe what they want to observe. If you think three-point shooting is overrated, you see Memphis stealing two wins from Golden State and emphasize those results in your mind and ignore something like how three of the four teams most reliant on three-pointers advanced to the Conference Finals. People often focus on all the failings of a numbers-based approach, but there are issues with human intuition and reasoning too. We’re fantastic pattern-finding machines, but if we’re biased we’ll find patterns that confirm what we already think.

If you want to test this objectively, you can look at every season and use a regression model to see which traits correlate with title winners. (This is a binomial logit model where the dependent variable is either 1 for a title or 0 for no title.) Using either win% or offensive and defensive ratings, three-point rate from league average, measured by 3PTA/FGA or 3PTA/(FGA+.44*FTA), is not a significant factor in determining a championship winner, even if you slice up the years and focus on more recent seasons. I even tried a variable that was proportion of points coming from three-pointers.

Using the residuals from the model to select the biggest under and overachievers, there appears to be no pattern with respect to three-point reliance. The Cavaliers were one of the best teams to not win a title and they relied heavily on three-point shooting, but the rest of the results are all over the map. Plus, they were knocked out by the Magic, who actually relied on three’s more. A contender for the most disappointing team might be the 1994 Sonics, who led the league in wins and net rating but couldn’t even get out of the first round.

Table: Biggest underachievers by ORtg and DRtg

(1) Prorated to 82 games

(2) Rose and Noah injured for the playoffs

(3) Westbrook injury

(4) Dirk injury; missed three games

The Bulls and Thunder were derailed by injuries in 2012 and 2013, respectively, and the Jazz lost to a better team, but reference the biggest achievers in the second table. Adjusted for the era, the Rockets were both one of the most 3PT reliant teams ever and arguably the biggest surprise for a title team as well, winning improbably as a six seed; they were 3PT-reliant the year before too. For a modern example, the Mavericks in 2011 upset a star-laden cast with a high-volume outside attack.

Table: Biggest overachievers by ORtg and DRtg

(1) Prorated to 82 games

Of course, that’s an overly simplistic method and there are a lot of things the model doesn’t catch, like injuries or match-ups. But the point remains that three-point shooting isn’t some significant handicap or else it’d show up in basic research like above, and title winners from 1990 have averaged a slightly above average rate for 3PTers. We don’t even have to go to the numbers. Strategies like space-and-pace and the Spurs-ian model have already won championships.

In fact, the only significant variables dealt with free throws. Teams reliant on free throws tend to do worse in the playoffs than expected. For instance, last seasons the playoff teams with the highest proportion of points derived from free throws were the Rockets (a first round loss with homecourt advantage), the Clippers, the Raptors (another first round loss with homecourt advantage), and the Bulls (yet another first round loss with homecourt advantage.) The teams least reliant on free throws? The NBA champion Spurs, the Wizards who knocked out a better team, the Warriors who, despite losing Bogut, took the Clippers to seven games, and the Grizzlies who took the second-seeded Thunder to seven games. This season, the Hawks are among the least reliant, which is a group headlined by the playoff team with the lowest proportion of points from free throws: the Warriors, who will likely take home the championship.

The other factor people often bring up has to do with Atlanta’s egalitarian approach to basketball with a high amount of assists. That isn’t a significant variable either with NBA champions, and we’re only a year removed from the Spurs trouncing the league with a similar style, ending the reign of the Big Three in Miami. If there’s something about Atlanta that fails in the playoffs, it has nothing to do with general factors like assists and three-pointers.

The Numbers Did Not Support Atlanta

When Atlanta collapsed, there were conclusions made that their meltdown denoted a problem with “analytics-based” basketball. This is a case only made because the Hawks had a number one seed and 60 wins. The analytics said, so to speak, that the Hawks were an overrated team that did not have much of a chance upsetting an elite team and should not be favored versus the Cavaliers even without Love.

Additionally, there’s the issue of single versus multi-season numbers for predictions as prediction models perform best when there’s some factor adjusting numbers to tap into the wealth of history and how players have behaved in the past. The Hawks were not seen as a strong contender by a variety of methods and advanced stats, and in that sense they outperformed the performance history of their own players so much that what we saw in the playoffs should not have been surprising. It’s like seeing that a player has shot 80% on 80 free throw attempts but knowing his career rate is 70% — you don’t expect him to keep shooting 80%, or that’s at least not the safest bet.

The Cavaliers by some pretty basic numbers appeared like the worse team heading into the Conference Finals, but, again, the more advanced numbers did not favor the Hawks. LeBron by himself is a one-man elite team, capable of generating contending teams from the æther. Cleveland’s team numbers tanked when LeBron took a winter vacation, and ever since he came from with the trade pieces in place (Mozgov, Shumpert, and J.R. Smith) they’ve been one of the best teams. Losing Love did not make up the difference, especially because Atlanta was missing Sefolosha and then saw a torrent of injuries hit some of their other players like Korver and Millsap.

In some ways, there was difficulty in the analytics community discussing the Hawks because there were two paths. One was defending a team with outside shooters everywhere and with unconventional All-Stars like Millsap and Korver. The second was being skeptical of a team who appeared to be punching above its own weight and using long-term numbers to show that their likely “real” strength level was a lot lower than their win record indicated. The perceived divergence of the two arguments made it challenging for most people to understand what was really going on with Atlanta.

Do Not Change the Course

Even with the team splintering apart at the seams in the playoffs, Atlanta overachieved in reaching the Conference Finals based on the cast they had. No one saw this as a 60-win team, and being one of the weakest 60-win teams ever doesn’t make the season a failure because they’re still better than expected. The thread taken from their season by the front office shouldn’t be, “What we’re doing can’t work;” it should be, “What we’re doing has potential.”

Winning an NBA title isn’t about encountering one failure and then immediately giving up, rebuilding the team from scratch. Dirk is a great example of the importance of perseverance. He lost in the first round as a one seed. He lost in the Finals. He was overshadowed by Duncan and Garnett at his position. He won an MVP and spent a decade as an elite player, and he still didn’t have a championship. But it happened – the Mavericks found the right mix of players and a bit of luck. Go through history and you’ll see a long list of failures behind every great player, save for Bill Russell. Even Jordan had problems; in the 80’s the Pistons were a gauntlet he couldn’t conquer.

Keep your core, and especially the star, and keep trying. The Heat experienced tumult with Wade and missed the playoffs, and then they landed LeBron and Bosh. The Spurs stayed together, even after tough losses, and they won a title 15 years after Duncan’s first. The Lakers had a down period after Shaq left, but they found the right role players and made the infamous Pau Gasol trade, propelling them back into elite status.

You can also frame their season like this: the Hawks had the fourth smallest payroll in the league. They were committing money to players like a rebuilding team, yet they advanced to the conference finals. That’s a very efficient team, and it means there’s flexibility and potential going forward. It should translate into an opportunity to strengthen the team, not one to blow everything up.

Failure Is Not an End

In a few days, either the Warriors or Cavaliers will lose in the Finals. Losing shouldn’t be an indictment of a team’s playing style. Kevin Love doesn’t even need to watch the rest of the series to realize his team has a shot at a title if he stays. And if the Warriors lose, it’d surely be a huge upset, but LeBron, Duncan, and Dirk, among others, have all been on the wrong end of an upset where an extremely highly rated team loses. The Hawks should understand history too. Their season was a pleasant surprise, and it should be celebrated and built on, not derided.