Demir McRae

At the time of writing this (NYE 2023), the three worst teams in basketball are the Detroit Pistons, the San Antonio Spurs, and the Washington Wizards at 3-29, 5-27, 6-26, respectively.

In a normal world, Washington or San Antonio would be a more interesting story. Washington’s isn’t unique. They’re a team that we believed is going to be decent, but once the season started, we saw what they actually were. San Antonio is a storied franchise that after decades of success have found recent struggles but may be able to find another dynasty after drafting Victor Wembanyama. However, the only reason that we haven’t been talking about either of those teams more is because Detroit went on a 28-game losing streak, tied for an NBA record, that was recently broken on December 30th. 

Now by record alone, these teams look bad. Detroit is on pace to win just 8 games. San Antonio is on pace to win 13. Washington is on pace to 15. I’m interested in two things, whether they are as bad as their records and whether they can salvage their season. 

I think point differential is a better gauge to find how good a team is. A team can go 0-82 and have a point differential of -82 (meaning they lost every game by 1). A team can also go 82-0 and have a point differential of +82 (meaning they won every game by 1). One can argue that the 0-82 isn’t nearly as bad as their record or the 82-0 team isn’t nearly as good as their record. 

I think this is a lot easier to see in football. Year over year a team will almost always have a really good record, but you realize that the majority of their wins were 1-score wins (wins by 8 points or less). Two examples of this are the New York Giants and Minnesota Vikings last year. The 2022 New York Giants had 9 wins out of 17 games and of those 9 games, 8 of them were 1-score wins. They made the playoffs and faced the Minnesota Vikings, a team who won 13 games. 11 of their 13 wins were 1-score wins. The Giants won the playoff game and then beat the Vikings…by one score. The Giants then proceeded to play an actual good team, the eventual NFC Champion Philadelphia Eagles and lost by 31. 

Instead of looking for teams that are “pretenders” (teams that seem good based on record, but when they play an actual good team, you realize they’re not on the same level), we’re looking for the opposite effect. 

Note: Margin of Victory is a team’s average point differential

I decided to use the absolute value of Margin of Victory instead of regular margin of victory because winning percentage can be used to make an educated guess about whether a team’s margin of victory is positive or negative.

This chart is broken up into 4 quadrants:

• Contenders (upper right): These are your actually good teams. Teams that are going to be championship contenders
• Pretenders (upper left): These are teams that have a good record but are scraping by in wins or have high variance in how much they win or lose by. Some people think they are contenders, and they might be, but they haven’t put performances together to prove that.
• Fighters (bottom left): These are teams with below .500 records that have to fight for wins and are most likely going to be fighting for a playoff spot at the end of the year.
• Bottom-Feeders (bottom right): These are the teams that are getting blown out on a regular basis. These teams are fighters, but in a different way: fighting for the #1 overall pick in next year’s draft.

The beauty of building a chart this way is that you can already see teams that are close to moving in between quadrants. The Los Angeles Clippers are right on that line between contenders and pretenders. Utah, Memphis, and Portland are close to moving into the “Fighters” quadrant. Looking at an updated view of this around the All-Star Break (mid-February) should provide a more accurate look into where teams truly sit. 

To answer the question at hand, whether the Pistons, Spurs, and Wizards are actually as bad as their records, the answer is an astounding “YES” with an addition of the Charlotte Hornets. These 4 teams are the bottom-feeders of the league.

Now are any of their seasons salvageable? Can any of these teams come close to getting a playoff spot? Especially now that they’re allowing the 10 best teams in each conference a chance at a championship. Although it seems unlikely, it seems interesting to explore. Has there ever been a team that finished within the top 10 seeds in their conference with a Margin of Victory as low as these teams?

*Note: All of these tables were produced using SQL queries found here. 

• How many teams have finished a season with an MOV as low as these teams? (Wizards had the highest MOV of these 4 teams at the time at -9.65?

Just to show how bad these teams are, 4 teams in the past TEN YEARS have finished a season with a worse MOV than the Wizards. There’s 4 this year alone and 3 teams (Hornets, Pistons, Spurs) are all worse than the 4 teams on the table.

• Where did the teams that finished with a sub -9.65 MOV finish in their conference?

All of these teams finished worse than 10 which would put them out of the playoffs. So if they were to finish with an MOV that low, it is very unlikely that they make the playoffs, unless a bunch of other teams happened to finish with an MOV that bad.

Another thing I wanted to check is how many teams finished in a playoff position with a negative MOV. 41 teams have been able to do that. Of those 41 teams, 2 teams finished as high as the 5 seed: the 2014 Brooklyn Nets and 2017 Atlanta Hawks. And the team with the worst MOV in a playoff seed (10 or higher) ended the season with a -6.75 MOV. That was during the 2020 season that was shortened because of COVID. If you look at the worst team outside of 2020, the 2014 Cleveland Cavaliers finished as a 10 seed with a -3.29 MOV. 

Are any of these teams’ seasons salvageable? I won’t give a definitive no because anything can happen. That is the reason the games are played. I will say it is very unlikely. It’s not like this is based on a small sample of games and there’s still 75%+ of the season to go. All these teams have played 30+ games. At this point, we know where most teams lie, at least on the extreme ends; these teams are not playoff-caliber teams.

To be fair to these teams, apart from the Wizards, the other 3 teams are in a rebuilding phase so making the playoffs may not be one of the expectations of the team. It could just simply be to progress. However, I’m not sure if these numbers would be indicative of being close to that goal. The Spurs, Hornets, and Pistons, were all within the bottom 2 seeds of their conferences. I’m not sure if we’ll see that change this year based on the numbers through ~30 games.