Winners
The Fans
Sports are back! How could we not be the big winners here? Although we missed out on a couple months of hoops, we are setting ourselves up for the weekend in October of the NFL, The Masters, College Football, and potentially the NBA Finals. It will be like an all you can eat buffet for sports fans in just four short months.
Wizards, Trail Blazers, Pelicans, Kings, Spurs, Suns
Another obvious winner. There’s a chance some, if not all of these teams would have likely missed out on the playoffs. They’ll now have a couple months of rest and in some instances, an easy path to a play-in game at the very least.
Veteran Teams
One of the biggest challenges of the older stars is conserving energy for the playoffs. Young guys can get up an go at any time, but there is a reason why LeBron spends over 1 million dollars on his body every year. Even the Clippers, who preach load management, will get an opportunity to be fresh and ready for the playoffs. Additionally, I would not be surprised if the Spurs and Gregg Popovich put together a little run for the play-in game.
Losers
Joel Embiid
There is not necessarily stats to back this point up, but no fans will likely affect Joel Embiid. He is extrinsically motivated. Either by the wild crowd in Wells Fargo Center or the showering of boos in an opposing arenas. With no noise whatsoever I believe he’ll struggle to put up numbers and ultimately win his team some games in the playoffs.
Grizzlies
It was obvious that the NBA would love to get Zion Williamson in the playoffs. The dream match-up is Lakers vs. Pelicans and it just might happen. The Grizzlies currently hold the eighth seed in the West and are stuck with the 6th toughest schedule. The Pelicans on the other hand were given the easiest schedule. But before you go all conspiracy crazy, the Pelicans were slated to have the easiest schedule based on win % for the remainder of the season anyways.
Other notable schedule losers are the Raptors, Lakers, Trail Blazers, and Heat. They all have seen a 10% win percentage bump on the teams they are facing in the playoffs. Only the Wizards have seen a decrease in strength of schedule, dropping a mere 0.6%.
Rockets
The Rockets have revolutionized the NBA by shooting threes at such a high volume. Naturally the farther away the shot, the harder it is to go into the basket. I think we may see the Rockets in somewhat of a slump in these seeding games. In their first 8 games of this season, they had more nights shooting sub 30% (4) than they had games shooting over 40% (2).
Right now, the Rockets sit in 6th place in the West, only a mere 1.5 games up on the Mavericks. If they get off to a slow start, that could be the difference between a first round match-up with the Nuggets or the Clippers.