( All stats in the story are through games played through March 28.)

'Most of the analytics say that once we get to that number the chances of winning improve greatly,' he told reporters, unaware that, about 90 percent of the way through the season, Toronto would be averaging 6.9 more field goal attempts than its opponents. Nick Nurse said in early November that the Toronto Raptors want to take at least five more shots than their opponents every game.

'The possession game' used to connote a slow, conservative, grimy style of play, but the teams that play it today are fast, fun and futuristic. He doesn't believe that any of this is incompatible with winning the possession game.īorrego is not the only forward-thinking coach who sees it that way. He wants Charlotte to run off made shots. Borrego's philosophy is that, in order to maximize the 24-second shot clock, you must get into your offense as quickly as possible and never give the defense an opportunity to relax. His freewheeling Hornets, though, are anything but behind the times. When Borrego said in that same interview that 'the possession game is huge' and he'd never spent so much time drilling defensive rebounding, it sounded like he was some sort of old-school taskmaster. Last year's Hornets had the fifth-highest turnover percentage in the NBA, per Cleaning The Glass, and they were almost as bad when it came to defensive rebounding. If you instead use turnover percentage and offensive rebounding percentage - two of the 'four factors' - then the winning percentage was 65 percent last season.) (Note for numbers nerds: I used total rebounds and turnovers for the above. I did, and Borrego was on the money: In the 2020-21 regular season, teams that both outrebounded and committed fewer turnovers than their opponents went 325-71, which is an 82-percent winning percentage. When I interviewed Charlotte Hornets coach James Borrego for an early-season story, he threw out a statistic: If you 'win the rebounding game and the turnover game,' you have about an 80-percent chance of victory.

Knicks score