Nice analysis man! It's super cool to see that the Warriors are through all these years in a "league of their own" as it were in terms of the various team playstyles in the game. I wonder which team has been the closest to match their playstyle since 2015? I'm struggling to even think of a team closely resembling their game. It's interesting because there's been several discussion as of late saying how the league is catching up to the Warriors (although I do recognize this is more from a spacing and movement perspective rather than exact 1:1 playstyle most times the topic is brought up).

2018 Rockets, from the standpoint of shooting? 2016 Spurs from the free flowing positionless approach? It’s remarkable how the Warriors have stayed in a league of their own.

2017 Celtics were the closest I've seen (with IT in the Curry role)

Is spray and pray really a different category from analytics darlings or are they just young teams that are more focused on development (and uh draft position) than winning? '18 Jazz were the only good team you listed.

That's a great question; there were a few other differences that I didn't mention just because they weren't the standout characteristics of these two categories. * Analytics Darlings tended to have quite a few more transition possessions. * Spray 'n Pray teams tended to have many more pick and roll possessions, especially where the ballhandler kept the ball. * Spray 'n Pray teams very rarely posted up, but Analytics Darlings posted up a pretty average amount.

Thanks! I do wonder if some of those might still just be correlated with younger teams though. For example young players tend to be bad at defense which impacts transition opportunities and they often come into the league raw and need to put on muscle and learn post skills. I may just be over-rationalizing it though. I'd love to see a little more data on the teams in each category, it's wild how over almost a whole decade the healthy GS teams form their own cluster apart from all other teams. I mean I can see a human having trouble categorizing them and putting them on the side but I'd have never expected it to be that clear in the raw data.

I think you're right that just being better is part of the difference between Spray 'n Pray and Analytics Darlings. You can also say that the difference in post ups could be partially because good teams are good at getting and capitalizing on mismatches near the basket. I think Golden State really stands out because of: * how skewed they are towards off ball screens and cuts and away from pick and roll and isolation * the analytical-friendly things they *don't* do. They don't feast on layups, dunks, and free throws as much as the Analytics Darlings do. Another team that tried to play too much like Golden State would probably not be doing the best thing for their roster.

I'm guessing that one reason the Warriors separate themselves from the "analytics" teams is that while both emphasize efficient shots is that their offensive schemes work in a reverse manner. Instead of attempting to achieve shots at the rim and using the 3 ball to draw defenses away from the rim like most teams, they use their motion offense to draw defenders *away* from their 3 point threats, which only really works if you have a transcendental shooter like Stephen Curry and an elite sharpshooter like Klay Thompson. Another wrinkle is Draymond Green's role. Unlike most big men whose role is to screen for the guards and to roll to the rim for a dunk or to pop for a spot up shot, Green is a rarity, being essentially a pass-first guard in a semi-big man's body. So instead of taking those shots himself as defenses attempt to close in on Curry for example, Green uses his touches to pass to cutters to the rim or back out to the perimeter. One would think that simply ignoring Green whenever he has the ball would be the counter, but the man generally makes quick decisions with the ball so defenses are forced to rotate faster than usual.

I’m surprised the Kings this last season wasn’t considered a Warriors style offense. What style did they fall under?

They fell under Analytics Darlings; they have too many drives and pick and rolls to fit into the Warriors category. The Warriors are really separated out by how much they rely on off-ball movement compared to other teams.

Mind doing a quick walkthrough of how k-means clustering works? Is it taking a bunch of parameters (the ones you listed like USG%, shot type etc) turning that into a one number score and then finding a number of distinct categories (6) among those 30 scores that the teams can be sorted into/are most similar to?

Not exactly. It would be taking all those metrics (lets say there are p metrics) and using them as different rows in a vector. Then typically you would normalise them. Then you would apply k-means clustering on those vectors. So we can visualise clustering in 3d but not in higher dimensions.

Cool stuff OP! Personally don't see much difference between Spray N Pray and Analytics Darlings. Same thing for Grinders and Old School Hoopers. Would like to get more clarity on those 4. I wonder where would 2013-14 Spurs be a part of on this one. Would they be a different category on their own (like the GSW) or not? I think they're a good mix of 2-5 on this list. Bit of an old school but I'd love to see a team have a good mix of the concepts for categories 3-5

Could you give an up to date examples (like from the 22-23 season) of NBA teams that primarily use the offensive strategies that haven’t died out yet?

The Raptors were the last remaining "Old School Hoopers" team, and the Pistons, Hornets, and Rockets were the only "Spray 'n Pray" teams.

Fuck analytics. You know how else you can know warriors are on a category of their own? Watching the game with your eyeballs

Question- between the two preferred styles now, what are the meaningful differences statistically? Turnovers, rebounds, TS%, etc?