History has shown that the Utah Jazz play their best after one day of rest. Back-to-backs aren’t good, but more than one day of rest is much worse.
The Utah Jazz are currently on a two-game slide in games where they were supposed to be favored, and (modest brag) I had a strong inclination it was going to happen. Bear with me. I’ll explain.
Over the past few years I’ve been noticing a very specific trend. Though, until recently, I thought I was just imagining things – like how wearing my lucky Jazz socks actually increases the team’s odds of winning. (I swear it works!) Unlike my lucky socks, however, it turns out this specific trend I’m referring to actually holds some statistical weight.
Here’s the thing. Rest days are supposed to be good for a team. Sports media, Vegas, etc. always give the well-rested team a “rest advantage.”
You will also see (later) that the average NBA team does indeed have a slightly better chance of winning when they are well-rested.
Not the Jazz, though.
As it turns out, the Jazz are significantly LESS likely to win after having two or three days of rest before a game.
Using historical data from TeamRankings.com, I was able to see win/loss records for each team over the course of several seasons, while filtering for a specified number of rest days a team had just before playing.
Going back to 2014, here is what I found.
This is by no means a knock on Quin Snyder, but the Coach Quin era seemed like a logical point to begin.
Yet, as you can see above, the past six seasons suggest that more than a single day of rest dramatically decreases the team’s win rate by a considerable margin (-7.3 percent), when compared to only one day off, from a 56.2 percent win rate down to less than half at 48.9 percent.
Even Utah’s back-to-backs have a significantly higher win rate, suggesting that (statistically) the Jazz would much rather play the very next night than take more than a single day off!
By the way, this isn’t typical of NBA teams. Data from the same window of time shows that NBA teams tend to fair slightly better after having two or three nights of rest, winning at an average rate of 52.2 percent – winning slightly more often than not, as expected.
Take a look at the columns to the far right. Notice that where the average team increases their win rate to that 52.2 percent, Utah’s win rate actually decreases to 48.9 percent – more likely to lose than win after resting for more than one day. (The good news here is the far left column showing that the Jazz are comparatively impervious to a back-to-back set than the average team.)
To be fair, Utah is not the only team that lost more often than not after rest. However, at first glance, those other teams generally looked to be teams that ended their seasons with losing records anyway.
Although, that wasn’t necessarily the case for every team. In my stat mining, I found there were in fact a handful of other teams that differed between their record after more than one day of rest and their overall record, suggesting that Utah isn’t the only team to experience this anomaly. (Who experiences it the most? Stay tuned…)
…which brings me to the tease for my next post.
I actually have a theory as to why the Jazz (and a few other teams) seem to be more vulnerable to too much rest than other teams, though it will take a bit more time for me to research and confirm. So consider this post to be Part 1 of 2.
Obviously, all teams need to rest at some point. So in the meantime, do you have any suggestions on how to overcome this rest dilemma? Because my lucky Jazz socks don’t seem to be working as well as they used to. Let me know in the comments below!