Utah Jazz predictably under-represented in NBA’s Top 100 plays of the 2016-2015 Season video

I stumbled upon the NBA’s Top 100 plays of the 2015-2016 season video. It was a fun recap of the year that features all of the emotions of the past season: game winners, great hustle play, devastating blocks, and lots and lots of fancy footwork. It was a great year for guards. And lovers of the long-ball have never been happier. In the end we saw epic battles between the Golden State Warriors and Oklahoma City Thunder in the Western Conference Finals, and the Warriors and Cleveland Cavaliers in the NBA Finals. Of course, I’d point out that the Toronto Raptors (the last of the Final Four teams in the NBA Playoffs) had a tremendous year as well, but there seems to be some sort of media wall along the 49th Parallel.

If you watch the video, and I hope that you do, you’ll see that all 30 teams have at least one showing. Curiously, almost every team is also on the receiving end of at least one highlight. This was very carefully curated, I’d wager. If this list was to be somewhat uniform, every team would get at least three highlights. That wasn’t the case, with three teams monopolizing the highlights. Of course, the Cavaliers (17), Warriors (15), and Thunder (8) played in a lot of games this year, so had more plays to possibly be highlights. (Add it up, it’s 40% of the Top 100 video for just three teams.) But then again, the Raptors (4) played almost as many games as those four teams, but weren’t up there. Furthermore, more than half the league (17 teams) clocked in at 2 or fewer highlights.

Talent isn’t uniformly distributed in the NBA, so neither should be the highlights. So enjoy them:

If you are interested in the tally, here it goes:

And when you format the data by team, you get a much more interesting tale. (Ranked by most highlights to least, in the case of ties the ratio between Top 100 highlights to lowlights is used, and any further tiebreaker is for their highest ranked hightlight.)

The 5 to 3 Highlights club:

That Joe Johnson sure is something else, huh?

The 2 Highlights club:

Here we find the mighty Utah Jazz, a 40 win team, that I feel like are on the rise. I am not alone in that regard. They do seem to take a pounding here with how many times they are on the receiving end.

The 1 Highlight club:

That dunk by Marvin Williams? Amazing. I can’t do that. But on the other hand, that Tony Parker pass to Tim Duncan? I think they’re just trying to keep pushing that legacy. The teams with the five worst ratios of “highlights to being the on the recieving end of highlights” were the Utah Jazz, Atlanta Hawks, Phoenix Suns, Philadelphia 76ers, and Detroit Pistons; these teams are teams that either have poor home attendance, are in medium to small markets, or are generally not that popular.

I do not see a co-incidence here, more probably a correlation. Of course, the Memphis Grizzlies had four highlights — but despite their unpopularity and market size, they really earned it. Three game winners at the buzzer and one ³⁄₄ quarter court heave? And one of the game winners was an alley-oop dunk? Memphis earned it. I still shake my head that there were so few Raptors highlights.

Meh.

If they return to the East Finals maybe they will earn some more respect from the marketing people -- even if they lost Bismack Biyombo (three times put on a poster in the Top 100 video).

As for the Jazz, I am still really HAPPY that we got to see two highlights. The Gordon Hayward game winner over Zaza Pachulia was key, and should have been a turning point for the team. The Alec Burks “dunk” on Jon Leuer was an exciting finish. But I don’t think that these were the best Jazz plays of the season.

What do you think?