Nylon Calculus: Rockets-Jazz win probabilities, style, matchups and more

The unstoppable force versus the immovable object: what happens when the league’s most electric offense meets the NBA’s best defense? The Houston Rockets have been carving a path to the championship with an offense from the future. No one plays like them. This is Morey Ball taken to the extreme where an overwhelming number of shots are either taken at the rim or from behind the arc (or free throws too if you want to count that.) In fact, forget those 3-pointers the team is known for: the most valuable shot on the court is one at the rim. This is, of course, where Rudy Gobert comes in. He’s the best at defending those shots; he’s our reigning rim protection king.

The Rockets were second in opponent blocks against them during the regular season at 3.3. But what will happen against Gobert and the rest of the Jazz? Look for how the Rockets run him off the floor with “five-out” lineups where every player is perimeter oriented. When the Jazz had at least two of their other starters on the court but no Gobert — Derrick Favors, Ricky Rubio, Donovan Mitchell, or Joe Ingles — they were a net negative on the court with a -0.9 rating. When Gobert is included that balloons to 10.8 net points per 100 possessions. Simply put, if the Rockets can make Gobert look outdated and run him off the court, the Jazz will be outclassed in the flash of an instant.

— Justin Willard (@AcrossTheCourt)

Defensive matchups

As reported by ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski, Jazz point guard Ricky Rubio is expected to miss 10 days with a hamstring injury. Although there’s a chance that he could be reevaluated and return to action earlier, this current timetable covers the first four to five games of the series.

That’s a blow to Utah’s hopes of upsetting the top seed in the Western Conference. Rubio has played a critical role in the team’s late-season resurgence and impressive first-round performance. Before the All-Star break, he was at 52 percent true shooting on 23 percent usage, with nine assists and five turnovers per 100 possessions. Thereafter, he went up to 56 percent true shooting on 24 percent usage while maintaining his assists and reducing his turnovers by one per 100 possessions. His overall impact was estimated by ESPN’s Real Plus-Minus at a solid +2 points per 100 possessions.

Most of that value was on the defensive side, where he seemed to bounce back to form under Quin Snyder’s system. It’s precisely the area of need for the Jazz in this series, as they confront one of the top backcourt duos on one of the top offenses in the league.

The following chart shows how Utah matched up defensively against Houston during the regular season. Each line indicates the defender who spent the most time guarding a specific offensive player on a given possession. The thicker the line, the more frequent the matchup.

All told, Rubio served as the primary defender on Chris Paul for 93 possessions, the most that any Jazz player spent on a Rockets player. Rubio’s absence leaves a rather noticeable void which, even if adequately filled, has cascading effects on the rest of the rotation.

Donovan Mitchell is a natural candidate to address this gap. During the regular season, he mostly split his time between Trevor Ariza and James Harden, but also had some possessions on Paul. Perhaps a less obvious candidate is Joe Ingles, whose defensive assignments mirrored those of Mitchell and who has actually done the job before: in last year’s first-round series between the Jazz and the Clippers, Ingles rather capably guarded Paul for extended stretches.

— 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 Rockets and Jazz match up.

As previously discussed, the Rockets play one of the most extreme offensive styles in the league, focused on pace, their shot-selection and the individual creation abilities of Chris Paul and James Harden. The Jazz play a much more deliberate halfcourt style, with an emphasis on movement of players and the ball. It presents an interesting contrast and Utah will need to use Rudy Gobert to stop Houston in the halfcourt and score efficiently on their own to have a chance.

— 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 Jazz survived a competitive series with the Thunder, and now get to face the 65-win Houston Rockets. My model has the Jazz rated as the fifth-best playoff team (+5.3 points per 100 possessions), meaning this series will be much harder than it appears on the surface. The Jazz have about a 30 percent chance to win if they can push the series to six or seven games, with their most likely victorious outcome as winning in six. The Rockets though rate as the best playoff team in my model, with a +11.0 rating only approached by the Warriors (+10.5 rating). Because of that, the most likely outcome for the series in Rockets in five, with each of the Rockets’ victorious scenarios being over twice as likely as any single scenario where the Jazz win. If the Jazz are able to steal an early game, the series could take a wild turn, but the Rockets should be considered decent favorites to advance to the conference finals.

— Jacob Goldstein (@JacobEGoldstein)