The NBA’s 16-team playoff field offers us a good bit of variety in playing styles and approaches to winning. We’ll see the league’s most prolific (in terms of usage) three-point shooting team (Houston) and its most conservative practitioners (San Antonio). The participants include seven of the loop’s Top Ten scoring teams but a couple from the bottom 10 (the Pacers and the Magic) as well.
But there is one characteristic that is shared by all 16 entries in this season’s Championship Chase – and by absolutely NONE of the non-qualifiers.
Can you guess that key ingredient of team performance that “weeds out” the pretenders – that one column of data, out of all the numbers generated by a 1,230-game regular season, that separates the “haves” from the “have-nots”?