Pace can be a useful statistic to get a general feel for a team, but there's a lot going on beneath the surface for the outliers in the Turkish Airlines EuroLeague this season.
Stats Review: What pace of play tells us
Stats
4 Mins read
High Gravity Matchup
Zenit St Petersburg scored a timely victory over Anadolu Efes Istanbul in Round 23 to leapfrog into the top four in the standings while pushing the defending champions outside of the top eight. After earning the final spot in last year's postseason, Zenit appears to be trending towards a more secure bid this season while Efes awaits the return of Shane Larkin from a middle section of the standings that is beginning to grow complicated.
Time management in the EuroLeague
Playing a 141-possession game – just a few more than the EuroLeague average of 138.4 – Zenit took control of its game with Efes in the second half, scoring 16 points over 13 possessions that ended with the shot clock below 4 seconds. Controlling tempo is nothing new for Zenit, which played at the slowest pace in the EuroLeague last season. While the team has risen back towards the middle of the pack during this one, Zenit actually looks to push the ball less frequently and works deep into possessions even more frequently than a year ago.
In the EuroLeague, it can be more useful to look at pace through the lens of how frequently teams look to play fast or slow rather than at their raw pace number, which tends to cluster a lot of very different tendencies together. Zenit and Efes rank as the most intriguing pairing of the season from that perspective because they operate at opposite ends of the spectrum despite raw pace numbers that are just over 3 possessions per game apart from each other
The graph above places every EuroLeague team according to two key pace-related metrics: proportion of possessions used in transition and those used with the shot clock under 4 seconds. It is worth noting the axes here: transition play falls between 5% and 15% of possessions for all teams, but when it comes to shooting early and late in the shot clock, Zenit and Efes represent the extremes, trending near 15% and 30% of their total possessions, respectively.
What makes Efes and Zenit interesting is that neither looks to push the ball very frequently in transition. The difference is how they approach half-court execution.
While Zenit looks to grind the clock down as frequently as nearly any team in modern EuroLeague history, Efes is nearly as much of an outlier in its use of early offense. The driving factor for Efes is how frequently the first ball screen of any possession leads to a shot, whether by the ball-handlers themselves or the shooters receiving their passes.
Apart from those two teams, the graph shows a cluster of teams around the 20%-mark for short shot clock usage, a reflection of how game half-court game pace feels similar across the league. There are only a handful of outliers. FC Bayern Munich and AX Armani Exchange Milan are the most deliberate offensive teams besides Zenit among playoff contenders. Crvena Zvezda mts Belgrade is the only team that really flips a switch in terms of tempo. Zvezda can push aggressively in transition at times and slow the game down noticeably in many others.
The status of UNICS as the most steadily aggressive team in the open floor has as much to do with the team's proclivity for steals as its intent to run. The locations where UNICS forces turnovers makes it easier to run. For most teams, transition opportunities are spontaneous and not necessarily something they force or even can force with their defense.
Pace can be a useful statistic to get a general feel for a team, but there's a lot going on beneath the surface for the outliers in the EuroLeague this season.
Looking ahead to Round 24
There's going to be significant movement in the playoff picture this week as Olympiacos Piraeus travels to take on Real Madrid and FC Barcelona hosts FC Bayern Munich. That pair of top-eight matchups pits four of the six most efficient offensives in the EuroLeague against one another, although Real is also climbing to the top of the defensive leaderboards following its double-overtime win last week in Monaco.