And so ends the regular season! I must admit, a big part of me was hoping that the Spurs would push hard to knock Denver down to the fourth seed; not only because San Antonio would thereby avoid potentially playing them in the second round, but also because it would likely make OKC’s path to the conference finals much harder. Barring a remarkable recovery in health for the Lakers or a sudden resurgence from Minnesota, it’s difficult to imagine the Thunder facing any resistance in making it out of the first
two rounds.
Even so, pushing for the win tonight would have represented a serious risk for a Spurs team that has the opportunity to enter the playoffs fully healthy after an amazing overall regular season and a particular stunning post-Allstar run. In short, San Antonio has every reason to believe that their team is capable of beating anyone, so last night’s game was much more about mitigating injury risk than bracket engineering. Whatever the case may be, the Silver and Black did fight hard to end the season, though the outcome felt pretty inevitable throughout. Even so, the box score always has some interesting stories to tell, as I will outline below:
Factors that Decided the Game
- One central but comparatively subtle issue in this game was Denver’s significant advantages on the glass, including DRB and ORB margins of +8 and +5, respectively. All else equal, these outcomes produced somewhat more offensive opportunity for the Nuggets
- Some of that extra opportunity came at the free throw line (+4 FTA), aided by San Antonio having more (+2) and worse timed fouls. In addition, Denver had a mild but meaningful edge in FT% (+5.05 percentage points). Consequently, they ultimately outscored the Spurs by four from the charity stripe.
- San Antonio’s relative shooting inefficiency extended beyond the free throw line to the field in general, as the Nuggets logged FG% and 3P% margins of +4.55 and +4.75 percentage points, respectively. As a result, Denver scored five more baskets. The Spurs countered with a huge edge in three-point attempts (+17), which did help San Antonio earn a 3PM differential of +4. This clawed back some of the lead that the Nuggets had built in other areas, but it wasn’t nearly enough.
Rare Box Score Stats
- From a team perspective, nothing about this game stands out as being super unusual from the perspective of basic box score stats. The closest thing that comes to mind is Denver’s negative 3PA (-17) and 3PM(-4) margins. Over the last 13 regular seasons, this was just the 142nd contest in which a team won by 10+ with margins as bad or worse in both areas. Probabilistically, this combination happens about once every 120 games, or about 10 times per season (on average).
- The most shocking stat to me was part of Jokic’s performance, as this game marked just the 22nd time in his 810 career regular season games that he played 18 minutes and logged no more than ONE assist. Almost all of the other cases were much earlier in his career; in fact, the last instance was in a game against Indiana on January 2, 2020.
What are Team Graded Box Scores?
Very briefly, these box scores grade winner-loser differentials for basic box score statistics, with the grade being based on the winning team’s differential relative to other NBA winners during a defined reference period. Think of it like a report card for understanding how a given winner performed relative to other winners. The reference period used runs from the start of the 2012-2013 season to the latest date of play, including only games in the same season category (i.e., regular season and playoff games are not compared to each other).
Data Source: The underlying data used to create these box scores was collected from Basketball Reference. In all cases, the data are collected the morning after the game is played. Although rare, postgame statistical revisions after data collection do occur and may affect the results after the fact.
