Nylon Calculus: Can the Hornets play faster?

New Charlotte Hornets head coach James Borrego is pushing a fast pace on an already fast team. Where exactly will their limits fall?

The season theme for the Charlotte Hornets, in the immortal words of a poorly drawn Sonic the Hedgehog fan art, is “Gotta go fast”. Everything that new coach James Borrego has pushed has said quick decisions, early shots, and pushing the ball more in transition.

And while all of those are things that the Hornets are doing more of in the preseason, they already ranked eighth in team pace last year, according to Basketball-Reference.com, a little over two possessions per game behind league leader New Orleans. They already were fast.

It’s likely that they’ll gain a little purely from transition possessions — they ranked as a bottom-five team in terms of how often they got into transition last year — but that only accounts for a five percent difference in terms of the fraction of total possessions relative to New Orleans.

But it’s not like the Hornets are the first team to commit to playing faster. In fact, we have the majority of league history to look at pace changes. Over this history of the entire league, this graph represents the percent of all teams that have increased their pace by percentage x in a single year:

For the Hornets, in order to be the fastest team in the league, they would need to increase their pace by 2.3 percent. That doesn’t seem like much, and in the context of the league, it’s not totally unthinkable, since that falls right around the 85th percentile. In other words, it’s not impossible, but it’s certainly a stretch.

But the data here doesn’t exactly just float by without bias. The three largest single-season pace increases ever all came in the lockout-shortened 1999-00 season. Fourth place belongs to the first year of The Process, a year in which the 76ers basically just handed rookie Michael Carter-Williams the keys and told him to go do whatever. Fifth-place is a Memphis Grizzlies team from 2006-07 that actually only played 93.6 possessions per game. They just happened to follow up the 2005-06 team that played 86.3, a mark that no one has played less than since. Other top-25 teams include the Denver team that set the all-time record in pace and an additional seven teams from that 1999-00 season, bringing the total for that season to ten teams in the top 25 largest single-season pace increases ever.

And what that should probably tell you is that in order to make a truly large leap here, some kind of outlier in the rules or your personnel has to happen. And with the Hornets, absolutely nothing screams that kind of outlier. The personnel are largely the same, the ruleset they play under isn’t taking away hand-checking or anything like that. They’re probably going to play all 82 games this season, so they don’t have that advantage to play frenetically, and unlike certain other teams, it looks like they plan to actually win games.

Except so far this pre-season, everything says that they’re going to try to be that outlier. The current pace through four pre-season games is sitting around 107.7 possessions per game, a number that would be a 9.5% increase over last year. That much of a percentage increase has only happened in the aforementioned lockout shortened year.

Now, it’s pre-season and everyone plays faster during pre-season. The Hornets are probably not going to actually average 107.7 possessions a game this season, especially not with a team that is projected to be even older than last year’s squad by minute-weighted average. But at the same time, it’s entirely conceivable that with better rest protocols, that this roster could make a strong push towards the league lead, and that should give Hornets fans something to be excited about.