Right. The opponents were so slow back then, versus now. The Pace stat is identical per game for opponent and you. Nash was much faster than current Rockets, but his opponents ran slow offenses which held down the overall pace of the game. MDA can't make the opponent execute faster, and their speed determines the Pace stat for the game as much as his system does. Opponents dragged MDA's Pace stat down in those first years. To see how fast Nash ran that offense, it is better to compare their Pace to rest of league, as a differential, then do same differential measure to fastest teams today.
The question is how much of this offense is designed by dantoni and how much is designed by Harden + CP3? Is dantoni a genius or is his players the one who should be praised?
Please correct me if I am wrong. Doesn't BBRef just use an estimation formulate to approximate number of possessions(https://www.basketball-reference.com/about/glossary.html#team_id) rather than scraping their play by play data and count the real number of change of possessions? Even on BBRef, the play by play data only became available since 2000-2001, for the purpose of comparing with historical stats, using the same estimation formula makes sense. For NBA.com, I checked their stats glossary, they just explain what pace is, but doesn't provide any details on how it's actually calculated. Scarping pbp and count makes perfect sense, but it is also possible that they use an estimation formula, as they do for offensive/defensive rating. If you can give me a link explaining what they really do, that will be very helpful. Thanks a lot.
I may be in the minority here but I like that we are playing slower and still getting wins. That's how the post season is going to be. Half court grind it out games. Might as well get really good at that right now.
