Nylon Calculus: A snapshot of every NBA team’s 2016-17 season

It might seem premature to review the 2016-17 NBA regular season when there are still 19 games on the schedule, playoff seeds for the taking and ping pong balls up in the air. But the fact is that the major storylines have largely been written. The peaks, valleys, twists and turns have mostly been drafted, with just the final pages left to be printed.

In the charts below, we can see the unique journey that each team has taken to reach its destination. They represent performance on various metrics in 10-game rolling intervals, allowing us to identify hot streaks, prolonged slumps, and consistency levels. Of course, there’s nothing sacrosanct about 10-game timeframes (indeed, we should generally be cautious of round-number bias), and we can use other techniques to spot trends over the course of a season. But let’s opt for simplicity here. If you’re interested in exploring the data further and creating your own custom graph, feel free to visit my Shiny app.

So, overall, how have teams performed throughout the 2016-17 campaign? The following chart focuses on net rating, with teams sorted by their season-long average:

A few things stand out right away:

First, every team has enjoyed at least one 10-game stretch of “average performance” or better — i.e., a net rating around or above zero. Only the San Antonio Spurs have been above average all year; even the league-leading Golden State Warriors had a brief period of mediocrity (-0.2) in mid-March. It goes to show just how difficult it is to sustain success and how the Spurs’ depth has helped avert extended time in the red.

If consistently high performance is rare, flashes of brilliance are somewhat more common. The Los Angeles Clippers and Toronto Raptors had notable peaks early in the season (when their net ratings approached +20), struggles around the midpoint and recent upswings in anticipation of a playoff run. The Houston Rockets, Cleveland Cavaliers and (to a lesser extent) Utah Jazz had a couple of very strong runs, while the Washington Wizards topped out in February. The Portland Trail Blazers and Chicago Bulls are in the midst of late-season pushes, as are the surprising Brooklyn Nets.

But by far the most amazing trendline belongs to the Miami Heat. If we fold their year in half, we’d get two polar-opposite performances — a bonafide turnaround case. They’ve slipped of late, but they’ve no doubt left their mark on a season filled with many compelling stories.

A deeper dive into the offensive side of the ball reveals a few other insights:

Though no team has remained at or above average throughout the season (the Rockets come closest), the Philadelphia 76ers have been below the league-wide offensive rating the entire time. It doesn’t mean, however, that they’ve been completely mired in ineptitude. They’ve had their moments, including a 108.5 offensive rating that fell mere decimal points short of the NBA average. This interval from mid- to late-January encompassed Joel Embiid’s final games before succumbing to injury.

More auspiciously, we find a couple of teams whose offenses have markedly improved after critical adjustments between the one-fourth and one-third points of the season. The Denver Nuggets have emerged as an efficient scoring machine upon establishing Nikola Jokic as the main engine of their attack. The Memphis Grizzlies have escaped their offensive doldrums with greater emphasis on floor spacing and expanded roles for Mike Conley and Marc Gasol. On the flip side, the Detroit Pistons have sputtered to the finish line, as have the Atlanta Hawks despite a slight uptick over the past few games.

Defensively, we notice similar league-wide patterns:

As expected, the Spurs and Warriors have reliably suppressed opposing offenses, with the Jazz keeping pace right behind them. The Hawks have had an interesting ride: although they’ve put together a top-five defensive effort overall, they endured a wild negative swing in the first half of the season before achieving greater consistency in the second half. The Orlando Magic’s journey has been the opposite — an impressive display between their 10th and 20th games, followed by sub-par performances the rest of the time. The Clippers have been on both ends of the spectrum, enjoying the NBA’s best defensive stretch at the start of the year and suffering its worst defensive stretch in early February.

A few teams have closed the season in conspicuous fashion. As detailed by our own Ian Levy over at NBA.com, the acquisitions of Serge Ibaka and P.J. Tucker have fortified the Raptors’ defense, enabling them to weather Kyle Lowry’s injury through a top-three defensive rating since the All-Star break. The Nets have been in the top-10 during that span.

By contrast, in what has proven to be among the most widely discussed topics this year, the Cavs’ defense has stumbled with the second-worst rating after the break. Whether they can flip the proverbial switch in the postseason is beyond the scope of this article. But it’s worth pointing out that, even after controlling for different scoring environments, their current defensive slide has been more pronounced than those in their previous two years:

Altogether, this and the preceding charts remind us that every team experiences its own unique moments of exhilaration and despair — some more prolonged and intense than others.

Next: Nylon Calculus -- Updating DRE with a few tweaks

The 2016-17 season has celebrated its share of individual accomplishments and league-wide milestones, the latter of which include the new collective bargaining agreement. But even without a single prevailing narrative, like the Warriors’ pursuit of 73 wins last year, teams have given us many fascinating stories in their own right.