How differently do NBA teams play today?

Examining the stylistic choices of NBA teams through playtype data

I’ve spent a lot of time in my stupid, dumb brace watching basketball this last week, and it struck me just how differently every team plays on a night-to-night basis. Despite certain extra-large broadcast partners suggesting that every game is the same — a race to jack up threes — I could not disagree more. Curry’s Warriors look nothing like Jokic’s Nuggets look nothing like Tatum’s Celtics, right? (Right!)

I’ve been thinking hard about this concept since I made the point that the best offenses in the league, excluding Boston, are average or below average in terms of three-point frequency this season. Although threes are obviously up on an absolute basis, both the spread of three-pointers across different teams and the diversity in how shots are generated are very much in line with any point in the last 25 years (beyond which we don’t have the data to prove or disprove these things mathematically).

I wrote a piece for Locked On dissecting what I’m calling the stylistic convergence myth — are NBA teams increasingly playing the same way? I’m biased, but I think it’s a really interesting read if you want to get a little nitty and a little gritty.

Today’s Basketball Poetry is a companion piece of sorts, dropping the history lessons to focus on the diversity of individual teams' play today. I compiled all of Synergy’s playtype data for every team through Wednesday and created the (hopefully) fun little interactive charts below. If you’re in email, I think it’s just a static, truncated view, but click the chart to go to the website, and you’ll see that it’s a bit interactive, letting you highlight specific playtypes for all 30 teams more easily.

Synergy data categorizes how teams use possessions into several buckets: cut, hand-off, isolation, off-ball screen, pick-and-roll ballhandler and roller, post-up, spot-up, and transition play. For example, if a playtype is labeled P&R Handler, that means the sequence ended with an action from the ballhandler in the pick-and-roll, like a turnover or shot attempt. It’s not comprehensive — especially today, many of these actions are combined, so the data undercounts things like pick-and-roll that start so many possessions — but it’s still a solid directional view of how teams approach offense.

(Synergy also includes offensive rebounds and a catch-all “miscellaneous” bucket, but I’ve excluded the latter for hopefully obvious reasons and the former because I think it’s more interesting to see how an offense generates its first-shot offense. So the bars below won’t quite add up to 100% for any team.)

Here’s how every team stacks up:

Ok! There’s a lot there, and I mostly want you to pick through it at your leisure and analyze how your favorite team compares to the competition (seriously, if you’re reading the email, click the chart to look at it). But it’s pretty clear that NBA teams are approaching offense from vastly different places depending on coaching, health, and player skill sets.

(Edit: Reader Michael Culshaw-Maurer whipped up some snazzy rankings for each playtype, which makes it even more clear which teams are running what. You can find that here. Thanks, Michael!)

This doesn’t even get into the different variations within each playtype, either. One team’s pick-and-roll offense might be filled with stack actions (screen-the-screener stuff), while other teams seldom utilize that concept because they don’t want too much congestion at the point of attack. So even two teams with similar play profiles might look very different on the court… but we don’t have any way to portray that right now (until someone eventually gets me that sweet, sweet Second Spectrum data).

Going back to the chart, here are some notable outliers that stood out to me:

• The Grizzlies are in transition a ton. Interestingly, their transition frequency here is larger than it is in other databases, like Cleaning the Glass (where they’re in third place), but however you count it, they’re running like crazy. They’re a relatively young, athletic team, and this plays into their strengths.

• The Hornets lead the league in P&R Handler possessions, which isn’t a surprise considering LaMelo Ball currently has a 100th-percentile usage. (They’re also dead last in post-ups, which makes sense given their hospital-ward center group). If you haven’t been watching much Charlotte basketball, you should. Ball’s been up to some absolutely silly stuff while leading the league in fourth-quarter scoring, regularly taking one-legged and/or running three-pointers. This one is a shot-clock grenade, but my goodness:

  

• The Warriors are first in cuts, second in possessions ended with something out of an off-ball screen, and third-to-last in P&R Handler usage. That’s how they’ve always operated under Steve Kerr, but it’s still a unique style worth highlighting.

• The Celtics lead the league in isolations. They spread the floor with all those threes, opening easy driving lanes for the Jays to saunter through.

I’ll leave the rest for you to play with, but I wanted to answer the obvious next question: how good are teams at these playtypes?