Nylon Calculus: Warriors-Pelicans win probabilities, style, matchups and more

Both teams had to deal with missing All-Stars in the first round, but the circumstances are much different. The Golden State Warriors are mortal without Stephen Curry. Using pbpstats.com, with at least one of Kevin Durant and Klay Thompson, but without Curry, they were a plebian +1.6 points per 48 minutes. With Curry? That balloons to an absurd 14.4 points per 48 minutes. This is nothing new, but you can see how his health will be important to the series.

Conversely, the Pelicans have been without DeMarcus Cousins for a while, and they feel fine. We’ve all seen the articles about how they may move on from him, or some of the stats on how New Orleans did with Anthony Davis versus Cousins this season. For instance, with Jrue Holiday on the floor as an equalizer, when Davis was playing without Cousins they were +6.7 points per 48 minutes, and with Cousins and without Davis they were a disappointing -3.3 points. But a lot of that can be explained by 3-point variance: opponents shot 33 percent from behind the arc when Davis was alone and 39 percent with Cousins. That’s almost all noise in small samples. If you assume league average percentage on those shots, which are mostly open anyway, most of the gap vanishes. There’s definitely some positive synergy with Nikola Mirotic and Davis this season, yes, but let’s not throw Cousins under the bus yet.

Plus, don’t you want to root for this guy to succeed on a good team so you can see what the human wrecking ball can do in the playoffs?

— Justin Willard (@AcrossTheCourt)

Defensive matchups

This series is full of intriguing matchups.

In the frontcourt, we have Anthony Davis, who just completed a monstrous series against the Portland Trail Blazers, and Draymond Green, whose defense has taken a step back but remains at a pretty high level. Steph Curry appears set to return from injury, and even if he’s less than 100 percent, he still presents a conundrum to opposing defenses. The head coaches have a potential chess match of their own, with Alvin Gentry saying that he just wants to “out-coach” his former boss, Steve Kerr.

But, as with the New Orleans-Portland series, this Western Conference semifinal showdown may be heavily influenced by Jrue Holiday. The Pelicans guard was, in many ways, a revelation, putting together dominant performances that overshadowed his more-heralded counterparts, Damian Lillard and CJ McCollum, on both ends of the floor. Now, he has an even tougher challenge before him.

The following animated chart shows how the Pelicans matched up defensively against the Warriors in each of their four regular-season games. The lines indicate the defenders who spent the most time guarding specific offensive players on a given possession. The thicker the line, the more frequent the matchup.

The Pelicans and Warriors had a somewhat uneven schedule, in the sense that the first three games occurred during the first three months and the last one during the final stretch of the season. New Orleans is largely a different team now, with DeMarcus Cousins out and Nikola Mirotic in the lineup.

Amid the evolution, Holiday has remained a fixture, showcasing his defensive versatility. The first game saw him split his time between Curry and Klay Thompson, while the following game extended him out to numerous other players, as well. In the third and fourth games, Holiday served as the primary defender on 47 percent of Kevin Durant’s possessions. This arrangement seems likely to continue in the second round.

— Positive Residual (@presidual)

Offensive styles

These charts are not meant to evaluate whether an offense is good or bad. They are designed to help illustrate how teams go about the goal of trying to put the ball in the basket. Each team’s offense is evaluated on four stylistic spectrums.

Ball movement is measured with the average touch time for each team, from the NBA’s player tracking statistics. A lower average touch time means the ball is moving from player to player more quickly.

Player movement is measured with a combination different NBA.com tracking statistics, and works out to average distance traveled per 24 seconds of offensive possession.

Pace is measured with the average length of an offensive possession from Inpredictable, a more accurate representation for how quickly a team is working than traditional pace.

Shot selection is measured with MoreyBall percentage — in this case the percentage of a team’s true shooting opportunities that came at the rim, from the free throw line, or on a 3-pointer. It’s a generalized measure but captures something about how much each team hews to the shots that are, on average, the most efficient.

On the graph below you’ll see a line for each team’s offense. As the line moves away from the center of the graph on each axis you’re seeing more of that stylistic trait. For example, shot selection shows a (hypothetically) more efficient shot selection the further you are from center. Here’s how the Warriors and Pelicans match up.

The Warriors and Pelicans have two of the most similar offenses in the league, perhaps a result of Alvin Gentry’s tendencies. He was formerly an assistant with the Warriors before taking over as head coach in New Orleans. Both teams play an extremely uptempo game that is heavy on movement. It should be a high-scoring and very aesthetically pleasing series.

— Ian Levy (@HickoryHigh)

Win probabilities

To project the series, I am using my in-season game projection model. The model is trained off historical game data, and accounts for rest, travel, team strength, and matchup. Since I began using the model to predict outcomes, I have been able to correctly identify the winner in about 70 percent of games.

The Pelicans’ reward for a dominant sweep over the Portland Trail Blazers is a tough series against the defending champions, just when Steph Curry is expected to come back. Curry’s health looms large over the series, with exact details about what games he will and will not play not yet revealed.

For this projection, I assumed Curry would miss Game 1 and then play the rest of the series on a slight minutes restriction with a decrease in production leading the Warriors to have a 74 percent chance to win the series. In simulations where Curry played every game at his full healthy level, the Warriors won the series 81 percent of the time. I repeated the simulation excluding Curry entirely from the series, and the Warriors won just 52 percent of the time, demonstrating the effect this unknown has on the overall outlook of the series. The most likely outcome is Warriors winning in five games (23 percent), but there is a high likelihood that the series extends to six or seven (56.8 percent). Expect the Warriors to win and move on, but be ready for the Pelicans to surprise us.

— Jacob Goldstein (@JacobEGoldstein)