Basketball has been reduced to a footnote.
The actual product of playoff basketball has been overshadowed by the Donald Sterling controversy. For new commissioner Adam Silver and everyone in the league office, the situation has consumed them. It's likely that every national news program in the country will be talking about the NBA on Monday. And not much of conversation will be in a positive light. Sterling, who has a long history of representing the ugly side of humanity, is now the face of the NBA -- not Michael Jordan, LeBron James, Kobe Bryant or Kevin Durant.
It's a shame, because the first round of the 2014 NBA playoffs might be the most entertaining playoffs we've ever seen.
On Sunday night, we were treated to yet another gripping overtime game between the Portland Trail Blazers and Houston Rockets, a series that should be the lead of every sports segment in the country. And yet, those highlights will likely take a backseat to Sterling.
It's the seventh overtime game so far in the playoffs, which, according to Elias Sports Bureau, is the most the NBA has ever seen in any round. What's more ridiculous is that there have been three series in NBA playoff history that have featured a trio of overtime games, and two of them have come this season: Thunder-Grizzlies and Rockets-Blazers.
Digging deeper into the NBA StatsCube database, which goes back to 1997, we find more evidence that this is the most electric playoffs in recent memory, and it's not just limited to the overtimes.
If you tune into a typical first-round playoff game, the odds are about a coin flip (52 percent) that you'll see a game enter clutch time, which is defined by NBA.com as games within five points in the final five minutes of the game. So a little more than half the time, you'll catch a nail-biter.
But we've been ridiculously lucky this postseason. Through Sunday night, 20 of the 30 games have entered clutch time. That's a whopping 67 percent, which ties the highest percentage we've seen in the first round since the league started tracking these things in 1997 (2011 was the other instance). So if you were struck at the sheer high number of close games these days, there's good reason for it.
The craziness doesn't end there. Once these games go into clutch territory, they stay there. Sure, we may have seen tight games in past postseasons, but not for this extended time. After accounting for all the overtimes of free basketball, we've been fortunate enough to see about 110 minutes of clutch time, which is already 30 more than we had in the 2013 first round. The crazy thing? There have been 15 fewer games in the 2014 first round compared to last postseason.
The result is that, so far, we've seen 3.7 minutes of clutch action per game. That's by far the most we've seen since 1997 and three times as much as we got in 2010, as illustrated in the chart below. The only other season that comes close to what we're seeing right now is 2002, which gave us 3.0 clutch minutes per game. The typical first-round playoff game bears 2.1 minutes of good clutch fruit.
This is not any normal year.
We can look at this another way thanks to the brilliant work of inpredictable.com, a sports data visualization site. It tracks the win probability for each team after every possession of every game, which leads to all kinds of cool analysis. Each graph depicts an emotional roller coaster of the fan, but the insights aren't just of a visual variety. For example, the site tracks what's called an excitement index, which measures how far the win probability graph "travels" across a game. The tighter the game, the larger the fluctuations and the longer the distance traveled on the curve.
According to inpredictable.com research, the average playoff game this season has registered an excitement index of 7.0, which is far higher than the regular-season average of 5.9. Through Sunday's action, the Rockets-Blazers series so far has averaged 10.4 on the excitement scale (Heat-Bobcats has barely registered a pulse at 4.7). In other words, the average Rockets-Blazers game has packed twice as much drama as a typical game.
We can slice this data in all sorts of cool ways. For instance, Damian Lillard has been the king of clutch, according to the site's win probability added measure. According to the clock, score and who has possession, there is a win probability associated with every possession in the game. Lillard has lifted that win probability more than any player this playoffs, according to inpredictable.com's metrics. By looking at plays that end a possession either by a shot, free throw or turnover, Lillard has registered a win probability score of 1.08, which means that, piece by piece, his possession-ending plays have cumulatively lifted Portland's win probability by more than a full victory in this series. LaMarcus Aldridge checks in at No. 2 on the list with 0.96 WPA, just ahead of Dallas vet Vince Carter, Houston hero Troy Daniels and some guy named LeBron James.
With thrilling game after thrilling game, this is basketball at its very best. Under normal circumstances, the late-game heroics would define this postseason. Unfortunately for the NBA, none of it seems to matter right now.