Stats review: What the first half of the regular season tells us about the second

With half the games played, let's see who has the most favorable remaining schedules and which teams have been the most efficient to date.

The Turkish Airlines EuroLeague regular season has reached its mid-point and there’s an elephant in the room. Several, actually.

Some of them are obvious, like one-loss Real Madrid looking to become the first team in modern EuroLeague history to finish the regular season with fewer than four losses. Unsurprisingly, there are a half dozen historic measures of dominance Real is in pursuit of at this point.

Others are only marginally more subtle, like Virtus Segafredo Bologna emerging as the league’s next-best team and tracking to eclipse the 14-win mark it set last season before the end of January. After going 6-11 to close the 2022-23 campaign, Virtus is looking to flip the script on last season entirely after taking sole possession of second place in Round 17.

While Madrid’s excellence and Virtus’s surprise turnaround figure to be the unavoidable storylines of the second half of the regular season, the lack of clarity in the middle of the pack looms as large as ever. The ever-present parity of the EuroLeague is well-documented, but where exactly that parity centers tends to vary year-to-year. Typically, it can be found towards the bottom of the playoff picture and on a couple of occasions over the last decade, it has nearly scraped up against the very top of the standings.

This season, things start to get interesting with third-place FC Barcelona, which sits just three wins ahead of 12th-place FC Bayern Munich. The table above provides a snapshot of the teams that fall in between, covering their offensive efficiency, defensive efficiency, and most difficult remaining road games.

While home teams are winning 61% of the time this season, that number rises significantly for playoff contenders. As a result, who a team plays is important, but where they play them is also a critical factor when projecting ahead. With that in mind, each team’s toughest remaining opponents away from their home arena are listed based on those teams’ placement in the standings.

No one will visit every team in the top four during the second half of the season, but Baskonia Vitoria-Gasteiz will face four of the top five. Partizan Mozzart Bet Belgrade can say the same but will avoid a road encounter with Real Madrid. Baskonia is one of only three teams with more wins than losses on the road so far this season and it will have a chance to prove that its record is more a byproduct of its character as a team than who it has played to this point.

On the other end of the spectrum, FC Barcelona not only has pole position among the teams in this group, but also has the softest remaining schedule as it will avoid traveling to both of the top two teams in the table and a half dozen of the other teams listed. Barca's efficiency differential also tracks well with its placement in the standings; it is one of four teams outside its opponents by 0.05 points per possession or more.

Panathinaikos AKTOR Athens is one of the other teams on that list and sits just behind Barcelona in the standings. In contrast, Partizan is this season’s most mismatched team. It stands out among this group in its best moments this season and has been the league’s most efficient offensive unit as a result, but its inconsistent, 13th-ranked defense has been a limiting factor.

There are lots of intriguing storylines to track across the EuroLeague landscape as the calendar turns to 2024, but none may ultimately stand up to the impending battle royale in the middle of the standings. The Play-In Showdown has opened the door for two additional teams to get a shot at the postseason than usual, but also introduces a major cut line at the sixth spot in the standings; there are going to be major ramifications for more teams than ever as teams look to no just qualify for the postseason, but avoid a potential one-and-done scenario as well.