Comment on [Game Threads] 11 JAN 2024
streetfestival@lemmy.ca 10 months agoI dug into this a little. You’re not wrong. It’s not a monster trend though. The 1st place team getting blown out probably makes the blowouts seem a little more salient (and frequent) than they are.
Through where we are now in this season (562 games in), there have been 10 games with point differentials of 40 points or more. This compares with 5 such games by this time in each of the past two years. (The season before that started without fans in arenas, and before that it was the bubble year.)
RandAlThor@lemmy.ca 10 months ago
How about a game like Bucks-Celtics where Boston was down by almost 40 at the half (38-75) and played the bench in 2nd half so final score was closer?
streetfestival@lemmy.ca 10 months ago
Great point. I wonder if that’s related to the load management crackdown this year (i.e., the effect being that players don’t miss games, but some games they play relatively few minutes). Unfortunately I don’t have a good way of testing what you’ve got in mind. My knowledge of open basketball data is pretty limited
RandAlThor@lemmy.ca 10 months ago
Damn you’re a stat geek. You should post some of what you’re seeing on here (what’s the lemmy term?). Yes it’s hard to capture those in stats. You went with 40 point blowouts which I think are pretty rare. I think 20 points is a blow out in NBA because by that time both teams have had their bench playing for at least 5 minutes. I remember Raptors loss to Celtics being less than 40 points wasn’t it but it’s definitely a blow out.
streetfestival@lemmy.ca 10 months ago
Thanks! I think the Lemmy term you’re looking for is community. I need better access to data to contribute more here, the major limitation being my awareness of what’s out there. Maybe I’ll try to summarize that in a post on here this weekend.
I also looked at point differentials of 20 and 30. They had similar patters across years. Here are the # games with at least a 20-point difference: 2021 - 93 games, 2022 (last year) - 82 games, 2023 (this year) - 102 games