Regular season and playoff basketball in the NBA are seen as completely different animals. There are no load-management games in the playoffs, there are no possessions off, and there are real stakes for every game. As Bob Myers stated at the 2019 Sloan Analytics Conference, the playoffs and regular season are "two completely different sports." With the 2020-2021 playoffs approaching, I wanted to look at the difference between the playoffs and regular season from an analytical perspective and see if there were significant findings in the numbers. For this investigation, I used NBA tracking data from the stats.nba.com API. I scraped team-level data from the past 6 seasons (2014-15 to 2019-2020) for each nba.com tracking statistic in both the regular season and playoffs. Further, I manually added an indicator for each season's NBA Champion. After looking at the data, it became evident that there is a significant difference in offensive schemes between season segments, as
Regular season and playoff basketball in the NBA are seen as completely different animals. There are no load-management games in the playoffs, there are no possessions off, and there are real stakes for every game. As Bob Myers stated at the 2019 Sloan Analytics Conference, the playoffs and regular season are "two completely different sports." With the 2020-2021 playoffs approaching, I wanted to look at the difference between the playoffs and regular season from an analytical perspective and see if there were significant findings in the numbers. For this investigation, I used NBA tracking data from the stats.nba.com API. I scraped team-level data from the past 6 seasons (2014-15 to 2019-2020) for each nba.com tracking statistic in both the regular season and playoffs. Further, I manually added an indicator for each season's NBA Champion. After looking at the data, it became evident that there is a significant difference in offensive schemes between season segments, as