NBA Trends Series: The Motor League

With so much going on around the Lakers, from their offseason makeover to the surprising sale of the franchise, there hasn’t been much time to take a breath, zoom out, and examine the bigger trends taking shape across the NBA.

That’s a bit of a bummer because this is one of my favorite parts of the offseason. I love digging into the data, looking for broader patterns, and trying to understand where the league is heading. I had a lot of fun doing exactly that with my three-part NBA Trends Series last offseason.

Still, one theme remained on my mind throughout the summer, especially after watching the Lakers transform into a younger, faster, and more athletic team. Was that shift deliberate? Was it a response to the overall direction of the league and the rise of what some have started calling the “Motor League” with young, athletic, high-motor teams such as the Thunder, Spurs, Pistons, Rockets, Hawks, and Raptors leading the charge?

Then came a DM from my friends at the Lakers Film Room podcast about discussing some of these trends. I love talking basketball with Pete and Darius, so that was more than enough motivation to fire up my data-crunching algorithms and update last year’s NBA trends work.

This one is for my fellow digginbasketball data nerds, with 15 trends charts to dig into and digest.

Today’s highlights:

1. The prelude and the follow-up

2. Motor components: pace, speed, and court geometry

3. Motor components: on-ball pressure and aggressiveness

4. Motor components: What about offense?

5. Are the Lakers (re)built for the Motor League?

Before I dive deeper into the data and trends, let me share two things. The first is Part I of last year’s NBA Trends Series, which I titled The New Era of Speed, Athleticism, and Aggressiveness.

I think it was one of the most consequential pieces of analysis I wrote last season, and the trend it identified has remained on my mind ever since. That’s because those forces only became more pronounced this past season. The Spurs rose sooner than expected, becoming a 62-win regular-season juggernaut before reaching the NBA Finals, while the Pistons joined them and Oklahoma City as the third team to reach the impressive 60-win threshold.

On the other end of the spectrum, the Lakers remained a highly skilled, finesse-oriented team that struggled all season against the NBA’s young, athletic, high-motor wave, enduring several disheartening blowouts along the way.

The second is the follow-up to my updated trends deep dive: my conversation with Pete and Darius on the Lakers Film Room podcast. For anyone who wants to go beyond the numbers and words in this article, I strongly recommend listening. We discuss much of the data presented below and try to put it into a broader basketball and Lakers context.