What’s to Blame for the Nuggets Game One Loss?
On Saturday night, the #2 seeded Denver Nuggets lost to the #7 seed San Antonio Spurs, 101–96. The Nuggets were considered the favorite going into the series, having the better record and home-court advantage, but it wasn’t enough to stop the veteran Spurs. As always, this loss has sent the hot-take sports media into a frenzy, with just about every columnist in town giving their take on the loss. Denver Stiffs blamed poor three-point shooting. The Denver Post’s Mike Singer blamed a late Jamal Murray miss, when the Nuggets were down 97–96. Both claims seem valid without any background research, how much does each observation affect the Nuggets ability to score points?
Data Used
To conduct this analysis, I’ve used the nba_api package, found on GitHub. This API connects to NBA.com, and can pull in entire seasons worth of player and team data. I loaded the data from every 2018–19 Nuggets game into a Jupyter Notebook, and then took a small subset of this data (Nuggets vs. Spurs match-ups) to analyze further. The dataset had 28 features (columns), shown in the image below:
Analysis
To understand what factors lead the Nuggets to score more points and therefore win more games, I wanted to see which other statistics correlated most with point-scoring. Obviously, statistics like the number of shots made are going to be highly correlative with points scored, so I left any observations that were this obvious out of my analysis.
Three-point shooting is all the rage these days in the NBA, as players like Stephen Curry have revolutionized the game by being more efficient scoring-wise from that area of the court than anyone else. However, it is not the only thing that drives winning in the NBA. The Denver Stiffs article linked earlier in this piece claimed that it was one of the primary reasons for the Nuggets loss on Saturday.
As demonstrated by the plot above, there is a positive linear relationship between three-point shooting percentage and points scored in a single game. However, this relationship is only moderately strong, as three-point shooting only accounts for about 55% of the variance in points scored by the Nuggets this year.
Making three pointers still has a positive effect, as the Nuggets outscore their opponents by about 8.44 points per game when they shoot 35% or better from three, compared to just 3.87 points when they shoot worse than 35%. To summarize, three-pointers help contribute to winning, but they are not the end-all-be-all that they can sometimes be made out to be.
To get a better sense for how the Nuggets match up with the Spurs, I filtered the dataset I had down to just Nuggets-Spurs match-ups, to see if any of the constellations related to point-scoring had changed. Surprisingly, a few other statistics strongly influence point-scoring against the Spurs. Assists and Defensive Rebounds both account for 90% or more of the variance in point scoring for the Nuggets in their match-ups against the Spurs. It must be noted however that this subset of data is very small, as the Nuggets and Spurs only faced each other four times in the regular season.
Conclusions
While the Nuggets would probably benefit from a few more made three-pointers in Game 2, it is not a stat that is going to make or break their entire series with the Spurs. In my opinion, and according to this data, they should focus on playing smart team basketball throughout the series. The data indicates that passing the ball and keeping possession of the ball via rebounding will go a lot further towards beating the Spurs than flashy three-point shooting.
