Don’t view ’99 as guide to short season

The Knicks lost three of their top five players, but introduced Latrell Sprewell in 1999 and made it to the Finals. (AP)

This season will be different, if not as wacky as the lockout-shortened 1999 season. There will be back-to-back-to-backs, a reduced training camp and less rest and practice time between games. Aging teams will have to monitor minutes more than usual, and with fewer games overall, each win or loss — and each game missed due to injury — becomes more important.

Over the next couple of months, fans, experts, coaches and general managers will all be asking: Which sort of team — old, young, filled with holdovers, stocked with free agents — might benefit from this compressed schedule? And which teams will suffer?

The only honest answer is: We don’t really have any idea. Smart people around the league have theories, but they happily admit that those theories have no proof, and that many of them would apply in an 82-game season. Dig into the data from 1999 — our one-season sample size — and you won’t find anything definitive, other than teams played very slowly overall and missed more shots than ever.

Looking back at what folks said before and after the 1999 season is instructive, because we”ll be hearing lots of the same stuff in the next month. The consensus among coaches, columnists and other experts then was that veteran teams that had been together a while would benefit most. They were already familiar with each other, didn’t need a training camp and were mature enough to adjust their personal routines within a new schedule. The chief beneficiaries, folks said over and over in 1999, would be the Heat, Pacers and Jazz.

Guess what? Veteran teams in the big picture are always better than younger teams, because veteran players are generally better than very young players. And those three teams — the Pacers, Jazz and Heat– finished with three of the top four records in the NBA in 1999.

But they faltered in the postseason, with two of them (the Heat and Pacers) losing to the Knicks. This was the same New York team that a lot of observers worried about because of another bit of conventional 1999 wisdom: Teams with several new players would struggle without time, in camp and practice, to develop chemistry.

“I see half of the teams simply are not going to be prepared because they are out there dickering and trading and signing,” Pat Riley, then the Heat coach, told the Palm Beach Post. ”Some teams are going to have a difficult time of getting a real roster of familiar players together.”

The Knicks introduced three crucial new players in 1999 — Latrell Sprewell, Marcus Camby and Kurt Thomas — and lost three of their top five, in terms of minutes played, from 1997-98 team (Chris Mills, Charles Oakley and John Starks). Then they made it to the NBA Finals, largely because they played their younger guys — Camby and Thomas especially — more than they had earlier in the season.

The Rockets added Scottie Pippen their core of Hakeem Olajuwon and Charles Barkley in 1999, but they lost in the first round and most people blamed the shortened season.

Folks also worried about the 1999 Rockets, who shuffled the roster around Charles Barkley and Hakeem Olajuwon almost totally, with the acquisition of Scottie Pippen highlighting the makeover.

“It’s going to be tough,” Brent Price, a Rockets guard and rare 1997-98 holdover, told the Houston Chronicle during training camp. “We have a lot of new guys, a lot of young guys. It’s going to take a while to start jelling, to understand each other on the court.”

The Rockets went 31-19, and everything was fine. But then they lost to a younger Lakers team (also 31-19) in the first round of the playoffs, and people scrambled to blame the compressed season for Houston’s demise. Here are two excerpts from the Chronicle‘s season obituary, the first a quote from Rockets basketball VP Carroll Dawson:

“I was looking at our roster, seeing eight new players, and I was watching our coaching staff, and it hit me that they didn’t have much chance to do it. They couldn’t teach. They didn’t have a chance to get the new players grounded in our system and all the fundamentals of how we want to play.”

And:

But in the end, Pippen, the rookies and the other newcomers seemed to need time the lockout-shortened season did not provide. And if it seemed an odd mix to have an all-time top-50 front line averaging 35 years old with an all-rookie backcourt, the Rockets had a team that needed time to mature led by mature stars running out of time.

Now that the Rockets had lost, they really needed that longer training camp, and they were simultaneously too old and too young to compete with the elite.

Speaking of too old: The Jazz finished a league-best 37-13 in 1999 but limped to a 5-5 finish over the last 10 games before struggling, by their mighty standards, in the playoffs. A middling Sacramento team took Utah the distance in the first round, and the Blazers eliminated the Jazz in six games in the second round.

And, suddenly in hindsight, the compressed schedule became a problem for the Jazz. Coach Jerry Sloan blamed a brutal April, in which Utah played 19 games in 30 days, and a lack of practice time for the fact that his veteran group couldn’t make the Finals again. Here’s Sloan talking to the Salt Lake Tribune after the playoffs:

“The one stretch [in April] really hurt us. … We played so many games, we couldn’t get back to the point of being mentally fresh. I honestly don’t think we ever recovered from it.”

And:

“If you had a younger team and got them on fire, it would be tough to put out. . . . It probably sounds like an excuse now, but that’s what it looked like to me.”

And:

“We just couldn’t [practice],” Sloan said. “And that bothers me, because I sure don’t think it improves the quality of basketball.”

The Jazz, the same group everyone thought would benefit from the compressed schedule, were now claiming to be its chief victims. Here’s the problem with using the Jazz as evidence that a compressed schedule will generally hurt an aging team: The Jazz weren’t just aging; they were ancient, and considering what happened to them after 1999 (and what happened to the Kings, too), perhaps we shouldn’t have been surprised they struggled against Sacramento and Portland — a team went 35-15, by the way. Utah’s three best players (Karl Malone, Jeff Horancek and John Stockton) were 36, 36 and 37, respectively, by the end of July 1999, and the roster did not feature a single young player worthy of starting in the NBA.

Guess what? That kind of roster construction is usually problematic. Leaning on veterans is one thing; championship clubs, including last year’s Mavericks, usually do it, though the key players on the 2010-11 Dallas team other than Jason Kidd were not in the Utah age range. But leaning on veterans 35 and older unsupported by any explosive young players will not work.

The Spurs of that season — the eventual champions – were just as old as Utah if you factor in individual minutes played to arrive at something called weighted age, according to numbers that Neil Paine of Basketball Reference shared with me. But San Antonio’s “age” drops if you weigh production instead of minutes, and that’s because it had one very young guy producing at a huge rate: Tim Duncan.

So, wait, you’re telling me that surrounding a superstar in his athletic prime with veterans who had played a lot together is a good idea? That’s exactly the point. You know which teams will do well in a compressed season? The same teams that generally do well — teams with good players in their NBA prime.

My Twitter feed blows up every day with predictions about how the Thunder, with young legs, will thrive in a compressed season. People said the same thing about the Celtics, the league’s youngest team, in 1999. Rick Pitino, then Boston’s coach, wondered if the team might make more noise than expected because of the tight schedule:

“If this was an 82-game schedule,” Pitino said [to the Worcester Telegram & Gazette], “we’d be saying,
 ‘Well, we’re still in our rebuilding process and it’s going to be three 
years before we legitimately have a shot at the playoffs, five to six
 years before we can get them to the championship level.’

“Now, in a shortened season, you get a lot of teams bunched up just 
above .500 and maybe anything can happen.  It could speed up the process
 if you’re lucky and stay away from injuries. “

The Celtics went 19-31 and were generally very bad. They did not have a roster like the current Thunder, a group that includes two of the league’s top 15 players and a bunch of other young guys hitting their primes. You could not build a schedule that would disadvantage Oklahoma City, save for assigning it 66 road games or forcing it to play only the league’s 10 best teams.

You know who else was awful in 1999? The Nets, who held over just about all their core from the previous year, inspiring The New York Times to say this:

Because of the enormous amount of player movement, other teams, such as the Nets, could move into the upper echelon. With 10 players under contract and the free-agent center Jayson Williams likely to re-sign, the Nets should start off strong.

Williams did re-sign, and the Nets began the season 3-17 before eventually blowing things up with the Stephon Marbury trade.

In other words, the 1999 season tells you nothing, or it tells you whatever you’d like it to depending on the example you cherry-pick. I had two readers/stats gurus, Eric Maroun and Aaron McGuire, the latter of the Gothic Ginobili blog, run a few analyses to see whether any particular efficiency statistic — effective field-goal percentage, defensive rebounding rate, turnover rate, etc. — correlated more strongly than normal with winning and losing in the 1999 season. The result: Nothing stood out. Team shooting was a bit less important than usual, but that’s because nobody could shoot that season. Fouling on defense hurt more than we’d expect, but each NBA season produces an out-of-whack stat here and there, and it’s difficult in a limited sample size to prove one mini-outlier is meaningful.

Let’s be clear, again: None of this means the compressed schedule will have no impact. Having a new coach and new system to learn might be a disadvantage, though a veteran team like the Lakers might weather that better than a young team such as the Timberwolves or Rockets. And having players who take care of their bodies, respect their routines, eat right and sleep enough might be even more important than it is in an 82-game season (when it’s still important).

Some NBA people think elite defensive teams might have an even greater edge than normal as offenses struggle for rhythm and teams work their way to peak efficiency. There is no doubt that older teams like the Celtics and Spurs will have to be more careful with their aging players, perhaps even sitting them on the second or third consecutive night of play — something San Antonio coach Gregg Popovich does now and then anyway in the regular season.

The 2011-12 season will not be normal. This is indisputable. But there is no way to know if those abnormalities will help or hurt your team, no matter what anyone tells you.