We keep looking for reasons the Denver Nuggets can't win the West this season. After Denver extended its win streak to 13 in Oklahoma City on Tuesday, maybe it's time that we started looking for reasons the Nuggets can win their conference. Here's one: From top to bottom, the Nuggets are the most athletic team in the NBA.
Athleticism in a dictionary sense is a descriptive term that normally describes things like speed, quickness and jumping ability. Those physical qualities are measurable, too, and scouting websites have published and archived that kind of data for NBA prospects for several years. But that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about what I refer to as "applied athleticism." In a nutshell, I don't want to know a player's vertical leap. I want to know how well he translates his hops into measurable basketball production like rebounds and blocked shots.
The end result is "ATH," a statistical measure that attempts to quantify each player's production in categories that are most associated with athleticism. I've found it to be useful for things like translating how a player's statistics might change when going from one professional league to another, or from college to the pros, or from a smaller role to a bigger one. By weighting each player's ATH rating by minutes played, we can also calculate the metric for teams. No team ranks higher than the Nuggets this season, and few have in the past (see the chart at the bottom).
"[Ty] Lawson is as fast as anybody," Chicago coach Tom Thibodeau said before his Bulls lost to Denver 119-118 in overtime on Monday. "You go down their roster, their speed and quickness is impressive. [Kenneth] Faried runs the floor as well as anybody. [Andre] Iguodala is a tremendous athlete. They have a lot of guys that can go. Even Andre Miller is a guy that plays at a different pace, but he plays in a way that's really fast. [JaVale] McGee is an incredible athlete."
Thibodeau's counterpart on the Nuggets, George Karl, has emphasized high-possession basketball and pressure defense during his Denver days. Since the Nuggets dealt Carmelo Anthony to New York a couple of years ago, Karl's also embraced a balanced, starless and, yes, athletic roster. The helter-skelter style of play Karl has implemented is a perfect fit for the talent Denver has on hand.
The Nuggets don't just play fast, though they rank second in pace factor. They also crash the offensive glass, ranking second in that area. They play the passing lanes, ranking fourth in steal percentage. They fly to help on the weak side, ranking third in block percentage. And to compensate for a lack of knockdown 3-point shooting, the Nuggets attack the rim both in transition and in the half court. That's led to a No. 12 ranking in foul-drawing percentage, but also has allowed the Nuggets to average 12 more points in the paint per game (58.0) than any other team in the league.
Not surprisingly, the categories in which the Nuggets excel are the ones used in the methodology to calculate ATH. It compares each player's percentage in rebounding, foul-drawing, blocked shots and steals to the league norms for a player of his height. The ratios are regressed for playing time and averaged together to create ATH, which is expressed as a number extended to three decimal points. The league average is 1.000, so if a player has an ATH of 1.167, that's to say his rating is 16.7 percent better than the league average. Again, the team rating is determined by the ATH scores of the players on its roster, weighted by minutes played.
ATH is a tool; by no means does it define a player and often it's more descriptive than anything. LeBron James has dropped in ATH this season -- he's still 14th in the league -- because of a dip in foul-drawing. However, he's as good as ever because of his shooting, which is a skill-based category. In his case, ATH shines a light on the evolution of a great player.
Denver's ATH score for 2012-13 (1.080) not only leads the league, but ranks seventh out of 924 teams during the 3-point era (see chart at the bottom for complete team rankings). Recent editions of the Nuggets also rank highly, but this season is the most athletic Denver squad of recent vintage. The biggest difference between this season's Nuggets and last season's squad is Iguodala, who ranks second in ATH on the Nuggets behind Faried. Iggy would be an elite athlete on any roster, but his athleticism jabbed you in the eye when he was in Philadelphia. In Denver, he merely fits right in -- the Nuggets have six of the top 75 players in ATH this season, with Kosta Koufos (73rd) joining Faried (eighth), Iguodala (35th), Lawson (49th), Miller (55th) and McGee (74th).
"As far as talent and athleticism, I'd say this is the most athletic team I've been on," Iguodala said Monday in Chicago. "But we've got to continue to play. Sometime you can't just rely on your athleticism."
Iguodala is right about that. The happy ending to this story, at least for Nuggets fans, would be to say that teams that dominate in ATH always go on deep playoff runs. Alas, none of the top eight teams on the historical single-season ATH list have won their conference. The 1982-83 Sixers, at No. 10, are the highest-ranked title winner. In fact, from 1983 to 1986, those Sixers gave us four of our 12 highest-rated teams, which in part explains just how much athleticism an aging Julius Erving retained deep into his career.
Athleticism in postseason?
Does a high ATH score help in the postseason at all? To address the topic in that context, I calculated the ATH score for every team during the 3-point era and matched it up with the combatants of every playoff series during that span. I was looking for instances in which relatively equal squads matched up. Using expected winning percentages based on scoring margin, I used the log5 method to calculate the one-game odds for each matchup on a neutral floor and isolated all the series when the favored team had a 3 percent or less probability of winning.
Out of 477 total playoff matchups, I found 86 instances in which the combatants were evenly matched by this definition. The team with the higher ATH rating won 53.5 percent of the time. However, in 38 matching instances since 2000, the better ATH team has won just 18 times, or 47.4 percent. It appears that more than a modicum of skill is required to win a playoff series, just as Iguodala suggested. But we knew that, didn't we? Anyway, there is a skill rating counterpart to ATH -- "SKL," as I've named it -- and without getting too deeply into it, I'll just tell you that the Nuggets rank 20th this season by that metric.
So more than most upper-tier teams in recent seasons, Denver will be relying on its collection of top athletes to differentiate itself this postseason. There is no magic bean when it comes to playoff success, but if Denver does leverage its ATH rating and style of play into an unexpected run to the Finals, we know one thing: It will be fun to watch.