Alex Speers

And in total, out of the 44 teams to make the finals over the last 22 years, only four had a bottom half half court offense in the regular season.

If you look at all 88 teams that at least made a conference finals, only nine teams had a bottom half half court offense.

And the average rank that you needed to make a conference finals was the seventh best half court offense in the league.

So now I want to take a look at the current standings, see how this year's crop of teams stack up.

So I'm just going to read you the top 10 half-court offenses in order.

So we're starting off with Denver, the Lakers, Milwaukee, number three, surprise to me, OKC, Boston, Cleveland, San Antonio, that's seven, Golden State, Minnesota, and the Knicks.

Now, there were four teams currently in the top six of their respective conference who are not in the top 10 for half-court offense.

That would be Toronto at 15th, Philly at 17th, Detroit at 18th, and then Houston at 19th.

Now, clearly the most interesting name there is Detroit because if this ranking held and the Pistons won the championship this season, Detroit would have the worst-ranked half-court offense of the last 22 years.

I do want to say, though, I do think there's some beautiful symmetry, however, with the fact that two of the outliers to make a finals were the 04 and 05 Pistons.

This is in their DNA to some extent.

But the whole reason I started thinking about this was because of that Spurs-Pistons game.

and seeing how the Spurs were able to absolutely shut down Detroit in the half court.

They held them to 65.6 points per 100 possessions in the half court, which is in the first percentile.

Now, the Spurs are obviously unique, given Wemby's presence.

So it's not like I expect the Pistons to completely stall out in the playoffs.

But I do think the lack of additional creation beyond Cade

is the biggest question mark regarding their ceiling in the playoffs.

The defense is going to give them a floor that will help them overcome some of those issues.

But as of now, when thinking about championship equity, I do think it's worth considering how much of an outlier Detroit would be among recent champions based on their current half-court offense.