Based on several internal statistical models that my colleagues and I developed, we all have concluded that the Raptors losing the way they did in the first round was somewhat of a statistical anomaly. Through an extensive analysis, I present evidence below that shows it was due to several coaching breakdowns in strategy that lead to the Raptors’ collapse.
Optimal preparedness would have been to prepare and utilize an extensive analysis of the Washington Wizards’ style of play. Using advanced machine learning techniques, we generated two results, first based on tree boosting, and the other based on classification trees that found the weak points in the Wizards’ system that would have greatly helped the Raptors in this series.
First, one should be interested in the most important commonalities and characteristics in the Wizards’ play. This result is as follows:
One can immediately see that out of several factors, the two most important factors in determining whether the Wizards will win or lose a game is their team FG% and the number of points their opponent score in a game. From this analysis, we obtain that to beat the Wizards, the Raptors should have focused on particularly strong interior defense, and in particular, stopping penetration. From an offensive point of view, the Raptors should have played a strong and slow half-court game focused on getting close-to-the-basket, high-percentage shots, instead of “high-octane” running up and down the court as they seemed to do very frequently.
Going deeper in this analysis, one also has as a result the following classification tree:
In this tree, “W” and “L” denote whether the Wizards will win or lose a game, “FG.” denotes the Wizards’ FG%, “OFG.%” denotes the Raptors’ field goal percentage, and “OPTS” denotes the number of points in a game the Raptors should score. One sees that for the Wizards to lose games, the coaching strategy should have been designed to ensure that the Wizards would shoot below 45.25%, while the Raptors should have shot at least 40.3% each game. Complementary to the above analysis, one notes that since three point shots are not fundamental to the Wizards’ offense, to accomplish this, the Raptors should have had strong half-court defensive schemes (including traps and trapping zones), combined with slow-paced, interior offensive schemes.
In conclusion, it is important to note that these analytical results and ideas were available well in advance of the NBA playoffs, and the Raptors would have tremendously benefited from using these ideas. I would also like to point out that I have only offered a preview of the results I obtained. I have also developed several results pertaining to optimal offensive and defensive schemes that would not only change the way the Raptors play, but would make them significantly better.
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