A Unified Theory of Basketball: Measuring success

The Indiana Pacers were roundly mocked when they agreed to trade Paul George to the Oklahoma City Thunder for Domantas Sabonis and Victor Oladipo just before the NBA Draft. George was an All-NBA talent. Sabonis was a limited young big man in over his head and Oladipo was a cautionary tale, an elite physical talent who had failed to develop into anything more than an ill-fitting complementary piece on two different teams.

The Pacers followed that trade by dealing for Cory Joseph and adding low-cost cast-offs Bojan Bogdanovic and Darren Collison. Everything about the offseason screamed preparations for a bridge season, very likely a bridge to nowhere.

A few months later, the Pacers will finish with a better record than the Thunder, holding the No. 5 seed in the Eastern Conference playoffs. Oladipo will almost certainly win Most Improved Player and may even garner a third-place MVP vote or two. Sabonis looks like one of the most skilled back-up bigs in the league, a punishing rebounder with a soft touch, deft passing skills and a 35.1 3-point percentage. Joseph, Bogdanovic and Collison aren’t just placeholders, cap flexibility made flesh, they’re key pieces for one of the better teams in the East.

Read More of A Unified Theory of Basketball: Inside the machine

And yet, for all the adrenaline-spiked wins and expectations smashed, the Pacers aren’t really championship contenders. Even if they somehow make their way through the Eastern Conference, which would be a miracle in itself, the Rockets and Warriors will be lurking. Despite significant improvements, it’s hard to see how the Pacers get from here to the plateau of legitimate championship contention.

Do we really believe Oladipo will not only maintain his performance level of this season, but that he’ll do so for enough seasons in a row to hold the Pacers’ championship window open long enough for T.J. Leaf and Ike Anigbogu to sneak through? Are we still convinced Myles Turner is nowhere near his ceiling? The Pacers aren’t owed any future draft picks other than their own current outside-the-lottery selections, and at some point the clock will strike midnight, transforming Bogdanovic and Collison back to cap space.

The question then is: What exactly have the Pacers accomplished this season? They won more games than they lost, more games than anyone could reasonably have expected. They secured the revenue stream of at least two home playoff games and brought some energy to a fanbase that has languished in ennui for years.

Is that enough to be called success?

The Portland Trail Blazers find themselves in a similar situation. They’ve blown past their Vegas preseason win projection by at least five games, improbably performed to the level of a top-10 defense and will likely earn the title of best team in the Western Conference non-Rockets/Warriors division. And yet, FiveThirtyEight gives them just a five percent chance of even making the Finals.

Just like 29 other teams, their season will almost certainly end in disappointment. But that doesn’t mean it won’t be a success. In a recent piece for SBNation, Paul Flannery gave us a look behind the curtain at how Portland is determined to define success on their own terms. In the words of general manager Neil Olshey:

"“This narrative that if you don’t win a championship then it’s not worth competing, that’s a false premise. There’s got to be an intrinsic joy of watching your team play well and compete. If it’s just about the end result and not about the journey, then what’s the point?”"

There’s tremendous appeal in Olshey’s perspective, especially for the majority of teams who are not legitimate championship contenders, and the handful who are but won’t win the title. But basketball is a business and taking a “success is actually the friends we made along the way” approach to running a team isn’t likely to yield job security for anyone in an organization.

So how can we look between the polar opposites of ringz and good vibez, and find a meaningful way of measuring success? The chart below considers at the 2016-17 season and a few different commonly-discussed paradigms for success.

Charting success in this way adds context and complexity but not necessarily clarity. Not every team that was profitable was profitable to the same degree. Not every team that improved last season improved the same amount, and not every team started from the same place. It’s harder to improve when you’re already very good. Conversely, it’s easier to surpass preseason expectations when they’re at rock bottom.

The unresolved philosophical issues here are three-fold. Success is not binary. Success is not absolute. Success is not uni-dimensional.

With this in mind, I would posit that we can think about measuring team success in the NBA in three dimensions — financial, on-the-court and by timeline. WordPress isn’t great for capturing a 3-D idea but here’s a rough outline.

Take the 2016-17 Cleveland Cavaliers. They didn’t improve or surpass preseason expectations, but they were a contender and won more than their fair share of games. They would undoubtedly be above the horizontal axis. The Cavaliers also tied up huge sums of money in building their championship-contending roster, pushing themselves deep into the luxury tax and ensuring they were the only team who didn’t turn a profit last season, according to Forbes.

Placing their relative successes on a timeline of present and future is an interesting issue to unpack. Focusing on veterans and sacrificing financial flexibility did nothing to improve their draft odds or help them build the next iteration of this team. However, they (mostly) kept LeBron happy and nothing is more essential to their future success than keeping him in town.

How about the 2017-18 Memphis Grizzlies? Their on-court performance was catastrophic this season, largely because of injuries. However, they were still (probably) profitable and, even if the sums were artificially inflated somewhat by the mechanism of the transaction, the recent deal that allowed Robert Pera to maintain control of the franchise increased their valuation considerably higher than where Forbes estimated it earlier this season. In addition, the Grizzlies accumulated lottery odds that will give them a chance to add a transformational talent in the draft, a success which could pay off in the future.

The z-axis in this paradigm is obviously the trickiest. We can measure positive and negative results on the court and in financial ledgers pretty accurately — the argument about ringz is not whether we can tell if someone has one or not, it’s about whether that’s the appropriate place to draw the line in the sand. But improving your potential for future success with things like draft order and cap space is only an opportunity. It’s percentage points of probability gained. It’s still incumbent on the franchise to turn that hypothetical added value into tangible movement on the x- and y-axes.

I think that’s why so many teams have such a hard time selling that kind of success as meaningful to their fans. The Chicago Bulls tore down their roster in a way that ensured they would end up with a top lottery pick. And a great number of their fans are somehow still expecting future facepalms when the front office spends those opportunities on something misguided.

Next: In search of basketball perfection

I will admit that one of the benefits of The 3 Dimensions of Success® is that it stretches the definition of success far enough that every team can find something to feel good about it. But in the end, everyone still has to decide for themselves what actually matters. Didn’t win enough games this year? Well at least you made some money? Oh, you didn’t make enough money? Well, at least you were able to improve your position for the NBA draft, feed your young guys some important minutes and shave another year off all of those bloated and ill-advised contracts.

None of those things work for you? Well … did you make any friends along the way?