Could the Dallas Mavericks be better than they've looked so far this season?
After Friday's 116-107 loss to the undefeated Toronto Raptors, the Mavericks are 2-3, with losses to two other teams that picked near the top of the 2018 lottery in the Atlanta Hawks and Phoenix Suns. All of that seems right in line with expectations for a team that won 24 games last year and had a preseason over/under total of 36 wins from the Westgate SuperBook Las Vegas.
Yet a closer look at the types of shots Dallas is getting, and forcing at the other end, suggests the Mavericks could be better than their record appears. Might Dallas be an under-the-radar playoff contender?
Early shot quality more predictive than shot making
Second Spectrum's camera-tracking data helps us divide the early results we see from teams in terms of shooting into shot quality (as measured by quantified shot quality, qSQ, the average effective field-goal percentage we'd expect given the type and location of the shots and nearby defenders) and shot making (as measured by qSI, quantified shooter impact, the difference between teams' qSQ and their actual effective field goal percentage, eFG).
Much as we've seen in the playoffs, while shot making has more impact on early wins and losses, it's shot quality that has more long-term predictive power. Second Spectrum's data set goes back to the 2013-14 season. During that span, shot making (qSI) explains about three-quarters of a team's performance in terms of effective field goal percentage during the first five games of the season. However, looking forward to the rest of the season, shot quality (qSQ) has about four times more predictive power than shot making.
The results are even more striking when we look at the best and worst teams in terms of shot making (qSI) through the first five games. The 20 teams in that span (out of 150 total) with the highest qSI through five games saw their eFG drop by 1.9 percentage points from the first five games to the remainder of the season, while the bottom 20 improved by 4.5 percentage points, largely eliminating the huge gap in their shooting over the first five games. (That the improvement is larger for poor-shooting teams than the decline is for good-shooting ones suggests the latter is more likely skill and the former more likely noise.)
The effect is even stronger on defense, where teams that hold opponents to below-average shooting given the quality of those shots in the first five games have almost no advantage at all the rest of the season over defenses that allow above-average shooting in the first five games.
These findings are consistent with other research on shooting early in the season, including Ben Falk's subscription analysis on Cleaning the Glass last year that showed the location of shots is far more consistent with results the rest of the season than shooting percentage by location. Second Spectrum data simply enhances this conclusion by accounting for the location of nearby defenders and shot type in addition to simply where the shot was taken.
Mavericks getting good shots, opponents hitting tougher ones
During the first few games of this season, no team's results have been more removed from the quality of the shots they're getting and allowing than Dallas. The Mavericks' offensive qSQ (54.1 percent) ranks third in the league, but their actual 51.1 percent effective shooting is just 17th -- worse than league average. It's the reverse at the other end of the court, where Dallas' opponents have the ninth-worst shot quality (51.7 percent) but have actually posted a league-high 57.6 percent eFG.
The Mavericks' shot quality starts at the 3-point line. Dallas is averaging 40 3-point attempts per game, or 43 percent of the team's shot attempts -- a rate surpassed in NBA history only by the last two Houston Rockets teams. (The Rockets and Milwaukee Bucks are also ahead of that pace, both attempting 3s on 45 percent of their shots.)
Last season, more than 20 percent of the Mavericks' shot attempts were 2-pointers outside the paint. That's declined all the way to 8.7 percent so far this year, the league's fifth-lowest rate. While the return of Harrison Barnes (who made his 2018-19 debut Friday) and Dirk Nowitzki should increase that figure -- both players ranked in the NBA's top 25 in 2-point attempts per game outside the paint in 2017-18, per NBA Advanced Stats -- getting up 3s has clearly been a focus for Carlisle.
So far, Dallas has shot just 33 percent on those 3-point attempts, good for 23rd in the league. But the Mavericks haven't had to sacrifice shot quality for volume, and odds are that J.J. Barea (26 percent) and Dennis Smith Jr. (22 percent) will shoot closer to their career marks going forward.
Conversely, Dallas opponents have shot a league-best 48 percent from 3-point range, which is obviously unsustainable. (Just two teams have ever had opponents shoot better than 40 percent on 3s for a full season: the 2008-09 Sacramento Kings and 2010-11 Cleveland Cavaliers.) As Falk noted on Twitter, his research found little carryover between the percentage opponents shot on 3s during the season's first few games (he used a seven-game cutoff) and the rest of the season. This is almost certainly a fluke.
When the shooting evens out, it should reveal the Mavericks playing above-average defense. They've allowed opponents 3-point attempts at a league-average rate and rank in the top 10 in preventing shots at the rim.
Taking and allowing good shots is no guarantee of success, as last year's Brooklyn Nets demonstrated. In a mailbag last season, I found that Brooklyn had the largest advantage in terms of qSQ in the league, yet the Nets still won just 28 games. However, Brooklyn's performance was an outlier. For the most part, teams that get far better shots than their opponents are at worst playoff-caliber teams. (The other top four teams by this metric all made the playoffs, and three of them won at least one series there.)
We'll see whether the Mavericks (and the Hawks, whose shot quality more closely matches their actual shooting so far) are this year's equivalent of the Nets, incapable of making enough of the good shots they're generating. But if the shot making for Dallas evens out at both ends, the Mavericks could be a playoff contender sooner than anyone anticipated.