Analysis

Does the Garden help the Knicks in clutch time?

The 2013-14 NBA season had an 82 game regular season. Of those 82 games the Knicks played, 33 of those games had come down to the wire. Of those 33, 14 of them were played at home, and 19 of them were played away from home.

Ideally, any sports team playing at home would thrive playing there, as the support of the fans and the energy in the building should give them an edge against the away team. To further look into this, I used data found online of every shot the Knicks took in the 2013-14 season and filtered it such that the data only displayed the shots that were taken during 'clutch time'. Here are some of my findings.

Analysis

In order to compare if the Knicks were more clutch at home games, we need to first look at how they played in away games. The donut chart on the left(above) shows the field goal percentage of the clutch shots taken, where the Knicks made 43 of 111 shots, which comes out to 38.7%. They missed the other 68 of them, which accounts for 61.3% of the shots taken. We can further break this down into an eFG%, which stands for effective field goal percentage. This is a statistic that allows us to account for the 3 point shot along with the 2 point shot by using the formula (FG + 0.5(3P))/FGA, where FG is the field goals made, 3P is the 3 pointers made, and FGA is the field goals attempted. The breakdown for these shots are shown on the left(bottom). For their away games, this comes out to roughly 46.9%.

Technique

This chart was made through filtering around 7000 lines of data, in order to find the rows that satiate the 'clutch time' condition for away games. From there, the donut chart was made through a search to see which shots were made and which were missed. Likewise, the chart with a more detailed breakdown of the types of shots taken was made by first filtering the data for clutch time. Afterwards, I checked which shots were taken farther than 22 feet away, which is the shortest NBA three point shot distance, and kept track of the misses and the makes. The two point shots will simply be the three point shots taken subtracted from the total shots taken.

Analysis

On the other hand, the Knicks did not fare as well as they did at home. They knocked down their shots at a slightly lower percentage, making 34 of their 93 shots for a total of 36.6%, and missing 63.4% of their shots. If we do the same calculations to see where they stand for their clutch eFG% at their home games, we get roughly 43.5%.

Technique

These two charts were made with the same method as mentioned above, except the games that were analyzed were the home games instead of the away games. This was done by using the second data set I found of the Knick's schedule of the season. The dataset of all the shots taken was already given a unique game identifier for every shot, which was in the order of the games played. To be able to match the two datasets, I created a series of the different unique game identifiers, and inserted that into the schedule dataset. Since the unique game identifiers were in order, they were already matched up with the Knick's schedule.

What do these numbers mean?

At face value, we can see that there really is not too much of a difference when it comes to clutch time for the Knicks when they play at the Garden versus other stadiums. In fact, they play slightly better at other stadiums than they do at home. While the margin is not significant, the data shows that the Knicks are slightly better in the clutch when they are not playing at home. This proves my hypothesis wrong, as I expected the Knicks to be able to play better when they were at home, as they had fans cheering them on.

Caveats

Since the data that was worked with was for a single season, it can be argued that the sample size is relatively small. Out of the 6740 shots taken that season, only 204 of them satisfied the condition of being in the clutch. In addition, this particular season the Knicks played was not exactly a fantastic NBA team. This could affect the data by bringing the field goal percentage down, as the players were subpar. To obtain a more reliable answer for a broader version of this hypothesis, we can take the data of multiple NBA teams across different seasons and check their eFG% in the clutch.

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse