No, NBA teams are not all playing exactly the same way
And if you think they are, you're not paying attention to the right things
Everywhere you look these days, you can hear someone making some form of the same argument: “Every NBA team plays the same way.” It’s everywhere. It’s on TV. It’s on Twitter. It’s made its way over to Bluesky. It’s probably in your group texts and your DMs and your G-chats, if you’re still using that.
And I’m sorry, but it is just flat-out not true on any level. Like, not even close.
In the sense that somewhere between most and all teams shoot a lot of threes, there is a degree of similarity. But there’s a pretty big gap between the team that shoots the most threes (55.7% of Boston's shots come from beyond the arc) and the team that shoots the least (just 34.1% of Denver's shots are treys). And there are much wider disparities in the ways teams go about actually generating their shots — even among those who get similar types of looks.
Chicago takes the second-highest share of its shots from three, for example, but runs around twice as many hand-offs per 100 possessions as does Boston. In turn, the Bulls run both isolation plays and off-ball screens significantly less often than do the Celtics. Despite those differences, they’re pretty similar in terms of their shot profile, and that's all that people tend to focus on.
Take a look at each team’s play type distribution, and you can spot some pretty massive differences in the way they want to attack their opponents.
The Grizzlies, as Ben Taylor explored at Thinking Basketball, essentially never run pick and rolls — at least in comparison with the average NBA team. Their 33.6 ball screens per 100 possessions average is not even in the same universe as the Suns' league-leading 83.8 picks per 100 mark. Yes, the Suns really are running more than twice as many pick and rolls per 100 possession than are the Grizz. And they’re actually joined by 11 other teams who are also more than doubling up Memphis in the P&R department.
I’m not sure how someone could see that, whether on their TV or computer screen or in the (advanced) stat sheet, and conclude that they’re all playing the exact same brand of basketball.
Similarly, you can’t look at the Jazz running nearly 70 off-ball screens per 100 possessions, then check out their former coach Quin Snyder’s new team in Atlanta — which runs just 29.3 of those per 100 — and not plainly see the massive difference in the ways those teams want to accomplish the same goal (scoring points), just based on who is coaching them.
Then you've got the Nets using a metric ton of dribble handoffs (48.8 per 100 possessions) to manufacture space for their players because they don't have an elite individual creator, while, as mentioned the Celtics barely need to bother with DHO action (9.3 hand-offs per 100) because they have Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown and Kristaps Porzingis and more. Boston just lets those guys isolate to their hearts’ content (27.1 per 100 possessions); but the Warriors (13.3 isos per 100) almost never do the same, instead running their motion offense that we’ve grown so familiar with over the years.
Of course, that’s just play types. They tell us what actions teams are running, but not necessarily how they go about their business offensively. To measure that, I borrowed a concept from friend of the blog Ian Levy, who back in the day created offensive style charts using the public player tracking data. I did the same analysis as Ian, using the following data points for each NBA team:
Pace: Seconds per offensive possession
Shot Selection: Moreyball Rate
Ball Movement: Seconds per touch on offense
Player Movement: Average feet traveled per 24 seconds on offense
I then converted each of those measurements into percentiles so they could be scaled together on radar charts, mostly because I like the way those charts look. And in those, too, you can see that there are so many teams playing basketball so differently from each other.
Check out the league’s three best offenses, for example. Cleveland is going about things in a way that is not remotely similar to either New York or Boston, which play somewhat similarly but also diverge in how quickly they seek shots and how much their players move around on each possession.
You can spot the same kinds of disparities among the NBA’s three worst offenses. New Orleans, Portland, and Washington all use vastly different styles of play to achieve their terrible results. There are a whole bunch of different ways to score inefficiently — which you can even do with a healthy shot distribution like the one the Blazers have.
How about some of the best individual offensive players in the league? Denver plays much differently than Milwaukee, which in turn plays much differently than Oklahoma City. And that makes intuitive sense, because Nikola Jokic, Giannis Antetokounmpo, and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander are not remotely similar players. Their teams play the style of basketball that best fits their skill sets, and they all still find their way to score at a top-10 rate.
Similarly, I’ve written before about how, at least in terms of the ways they create offense for themselves and others, Luka Doncic and LeBron James might be the closest thing to each other in the league. And yet, their teams appear to play much differently, and they each are significantly different than, say, the Sixers. And the Sixers would likely be even more different than them both if their star players had been remotely healthy this season.
We can also look at some of the younger teams with highly unusual offenses. Memphis, as mentioned, runs a much different offense than pretty much everyone else in the NBA. But its way of going about things from an offensive theory standpoint is also much different from teams like Orlando and Utah, which are also not similar to each other at all.
And honestly, if you’re paying attention, it’s not even all that hard to spot these differences in style of play. If you’re willing to look at anything beyond “everybody shoots threes,” that is.
There are plenty of legitimate critiques of today’s NBA. The idea that everyone in the league is playing the same exact way just isn’t one of them.
This was such a great read! Thank you for crunching these numbers!!!
I wonder if the general public actually means what they say (that every team plays the same way), or if casual basketball fans are more inclined to just look at the shot profile, and interpret that as the style of play. I knew in my heart that an analysis like this existed. I wasn't willing to do it myself, but you've confirmed my suspicions.
A bigger part of the argument here is that even if every team did play the same way, would that even be a real argument as to why the league isn't great? My specialty is the NFL, and in that league there's about four different ways to play offence, much like the five sided pie charts you've presented here. The NFL is known worldwide for how homogenous it is, yet nobody goes on about the NFL's actually homogeneity as much as they go on about how they perceive basketball to be homogenous.
I don't think people actually mind homogeneity that much, even in the league where it does exist. I've taken to feeling like people complaining about homogeneity is more of a buzzword to complain about the real issues. For instance, I believe the league needs more physical contact in it. I dislike three point shots because there is not much body-on-body involved. If there were a way to mesh these two things, I would do it in a heartbeat.
Since I do understand the casuals' frustrations, I wonder if their constant complaints about homogeneity are really just more complaints about three point shots. If the homogeneity did not come in the form of 3PT attempts, I don't think it would be an issue.