Slow Basketball Teams Aren't Winning Titles

Note a key word in the title of this post: slow teams aren't winning titles, not can't. No one can definitively say whether they CAN'T. But we can determine whether they aren't at an abnormal rate.

On the heels of Virginia's momentous upset loss to UMBC, the first time that a 1 seed has lost to a 16, a hot argument right now is whether teams that play that slow really suffer from an automatic disadvantage due to their pace of play. KenPom weighed in before the tournament on this very subject: 

I think there's a legitimate angle for skepticism given the lack of historical precedent for an ultra-slow defense-heavy team making a deep run.

— Ken Pomeroy (@kenpomeroy) March 8, 2018

I'm focusing on the speed part of this angle, so is it really that abnormal that no "ultra-slow" team has won the title? At least since statisticians like KenPom have been tracking pace metrics explicitly?

One of the original ideas underlying basketball analytics is that slowing the game down is an optimal strategy for the underdog, as outlined in Dean Oliver's seminal work, Basketball on Paper:

A third risky strategy-one most people may not have considered-is to slow the pace down, reducing the number of possessions in a game ... This strategy is used when an underdog gets an early lead on a favorite. What it does is limit the better team from taking full advantage of being better. A good team will win out over a bad team if you play long enough. By cutting a game down to fewer possessions, an underdog is limiting how long the favorite has to prove it is better.

(This strategy) fundamentally increase(s) the variability of the difference between points scored and points allowed ... The slow-down strategy actually works by increasing the variability of both offensive and defensive ratings. (Oliver p. 128)

So teams like Virginia play like underdogs even though their favorites, which in turn helps the actual underdogs (since the sport is a zero-sum game). Less possessions = more variability = more of a chance for the underdog.

My first step was to verify that it is in fact the case that slow teams actually aren't winning titles. And they aren't. Since 2002 (when KenPom's data begins), no team in the bottom 10% percentile of adjusted tempo has won it all, and Villanova's championship in 2016 is the closest at the 19.9% percentile.

In light of the above strategy, this presents a chicken-and-the-egg problem. Do teams generally play slow BECAUSE they're worse and realize it? Meaning there just haven't been that many teams that are both good AND slow? 

Using historical futures odds since 2009 (pre NCAA tournament), I determined that there have only been 3 teams each year (on average) that had > 0.1% of winning the championship AND played at a tempo in the bottom 10% percentile. Added together, these good/slow teams have had a 7.97% chance of winning the tournament each season, per the Vegas odds market. That means that there's a 92.03% chance each season that a non-slow team lifts the trophy. Therefore, there's a 24.37% chance that no good/slow team has won it in the past 17 seasons (92.03%^17), which falls well outside any reasonable confidence level to conclude otherwise (that this isn't random and is actually a by product of the style of play). Those teams have probably just been slightly unlucky.

The teams that fall in the bottom 10% this year and are still alive are Michigan and Syracuse (as of when this article was written). So who knows, maybe in 2 weeks one of them will prove us all wrong and finally do it. 

Alternatively, it's not too hard to imagine the counterfactual universe in which all of this is moot and a slow team already won the championship. If Virginia doesn't blow their lead to Syracuse in 2016 and makes the Final Four, they would have had a very good chance of going on to win it all. Even more damning: Wisconsin easily met the criteria in 2015 (7th slowest team in the country), but fell short in the title game by less than two possessions.