By the Numbers: How weird is 2020-21 NBA season at quarter mark?

Raptors guard Fred VanVleet talks about a new challenge for him and the team of late, and is excited for the chance to come together as a team and dig themselves out of their early hole.

For a whole host of reasons it’s a weird NBA season. It started two months later than the 2019–20 season did, and it will — pandemic willing — end a couple of months earlier. There was no pre-season, and the Toronto Raptors are playing home games in Tampa and practising in a hotel ballroom.

The Memphis Grizzlies, meanwhile, haven’t lost in three full weeks, but that’s at least partly because they’ve had six games postponed in that span. All in all, there have been 22 postponements to date due to health and safety protocols.

And that’s basically the tip of the weirdness iceberg.

But how much is all the weirdness affecting play through the early days of the season? As the Raptors hit the 18-game mark — exactly one quarter of the way through the 72-game 2020–21 campaign — we took a look at the numbers to see what’s changed, and what’s remarkably managed to stay the same.

When it’s time to parity, we will parity hard

One of the most glaring differences this season, even as early on as we are, has been the gap between the top and bottom teams.

As of Nov. 29, 2019, the date the Raptors hit their 18th game:

• Three teams (the Lakers, Bucks and Nuggets) had winning percentages better than .800, and seven were .700 or better.
• Exactly 8.5 games separated the first and eighth seeds in each conference.

As of Thursday morning:

• Zero teams have winning percentages better than .800, and just three (the Jazz, Lakers and Clippers) are better than .700.
• Just 5.0 games separate first from eighth in the East, and that number is 4.5 games in the West.
• The only team more than 8.5 games out of first place in either conference right now is the Timberwolves, and they’re just 9.5 games behind the Jazz.

So far, whether due to injury or COVID uncertainty or simply the lack of a full pre-season to prepare, there’s been a flattening of the NBA tier system, and only a small handful feel truly out of it.

If this trend sticks through the second quarter of the season, it could make for an incredibly confusing trade deadline.

Eastern semi-standard time

Another weird thing about the standings on Nov. 29, 2019: The Eastern playoff field had basically already been set — with only the Magic, then in ninth, jumping over the Hornets, then in eighth. Given how tight things are at the moment, that seems unlikely to hold true this season.

That said, the playoff field to date doesn’t look all that dissimilar from last year’s. With the Raptors and Heat faltering early, the Hawks and Cavaliers — both on the outside looking in at last year’s playoffs — have jumped into the top eight. The other six teams currently in playoff spots appeared in the post-season last year as well.

All that said, this situation is ripe with volatility, and this year will be different (did we say it’s a weird season?) because the seventh, eighth, ninth and 10th seeds will compete in a play-in tournament for the seventh and eighth spots. Therefore, it would not be surprising to see either three or no new teams in the top eight by year’s end.

Case in point: Just 2.5 games separate the so-far-injury-plagued Heat in the 13th spot from the Hawks and Cavs currently tied for sixth. The Raptors, meanwhile, sit in the 11th spot — just a half game out of the play-in tournament, should their placement so far end up holding through the end of the season.

All in all, if you’ve gotta start 2-8 some time, this is the season to do it.

The more things change…

But what about the way teams are playing?

Well, another league-wide trend has simply carried through to this season, and that’s the ever-growing number of three-pointers being taken. Here’s the number of threes taken per team per game over the last five seasons (2020–21 numbers through Jan. 28; others through the full season):

• 2016–17: 27.0
• 2017–18: 29.0
• 2018–19: 32.0
• 2019–20: 34.1
• 2020–21: 35.0

The Raptors are a slightly different story, only in that there’s been a larger leap from season to season, but they’re still following the trend:

• 2016–17: 24.3
• 2017–18: 33.0
• 2018–19: 31.2
• 2019–20: 37.0
• 2020–21: 43.2

Even historically, that’s a lot of threes. The Raptors are currently leading the league, and only the Rockets of the past two seasons have taken more per game.

League scoring, meanwhile — at 111.3 points per game — is pretty much on par with the last two seasons, when it was 111.2 in 2018–19 and 111.8 in 2019–20. League-wide FG% is nearly identical over the past five years, too:

• 2016–17: 45.7%
• 2017–18: 46.0%
• 2018–19: 46.1%
• 2019–20: 46.0%
• 2020–21: 46.0%

With everything that’s going on, it’s almost weirder that there isn’t more variance here — the league as a whole isn’t even a decimal point off its overall shooting performance from last season, which kind of discounts a wobbly-leg theory due to lack of pre-season.

Of course, the Raptors are in a different boat. As much heat as they’ve taken for their play on both ends so far, it won’t surprise you to know they’re underperforming that league average and their recent performances:

• 2016–17: 46.2%
• 2017–18: 47.2%
• 2018–19: 44.9%
• 2019–20: 45.8%
• 2020–21: 43.6%

Even with the additional threes they’re taking — and the departures of Marc Gasol and Serge Ibaka in the off-season — that number seems unsustainably low, especially considering the league overall hasn’t taken a step back and the Raptors are hitting on a slightly higher percentage of triples than they did last season. A regression to the FG% mean of the last few years could turn some of the tight losses to date into the kind of gutsy narrow victories often enjoyed in 2019–20.

Or, at least, it could do that — should this season not get any weirder.

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