Asking About Playoff Stats
In the NBA playoffs, ordinary men become legends. Likewise, you can take your StatMuse skills to legendary levels by mastering asking questions about playoff stats. By tweaking the fundamentals learned in the tutorials for asking about basic stats, advanced stats and shot charts, you can clinch a spot in the StatMuse postseason. If Popovich has been resting you during the regular season, now is your time to shine.
(Stats included are accurate as of the time of publication and results may have since changed).
The Playoffs vs. A Playoffs
Just like a StatMuse regular season question, playoff questions thrive on specificity. The typical answer will default to regular season stats, so you have to add the word “playoffs” to get postseason results. However, you must also specify what you mean by “playoffs.” For example, the question “Who has the highest PPG in the playoffs?” returns the following results:
The results default to a player’s career stats in the playoffs. If you want to know who had the highest average during a specific playoff run in a single season, you can ask by season with “Who had the highest PPG in a season in the playoffs?” and get completely different results:
Well, maybe they’re not completely different as the same player sits atop each list; but with these two slightly different phrases you can see that Michael Jordan has the highest career scoring average in the playoffs and the highest average in a single postseason. 🐐
Conference Finals and NBA Finals
While the question above looks at the entirety of a playoff run in a season, you can narrow results for stats specifically from conference finals and the NBA Finals (questions by first and second round coming soon). So, you can see which teams have controlled their conferences by asking “Which team has played the most games in the conference finals?” If you’re remotely familiar with the NBA, you should be able to guess the answers:
Simply switch “conference finals” with “NBA finals” to narrow your question to the league’s ultimate seven-game series. Asking “Which team has the highest margin of victory per game in a season in the NBA Finals?” reveals that perhaps resting players in February leads to fresh legs that can pull off an epic beatdown in June:
Single Game Performances
Ask about individual game performances using the same advanced formulas as regular season questions. All you have to do is change “in a game” to “in a game in the playoffs” or “in a game in the finals” like so:
Playoff Shot Charts
Use the same tricks found in our shot charts tutorial to instantly generate shot charts from individual playoff games or span through a team or player’s postseason history:
Try It Yourself
Now that you’ve seen some of the NBA postseason questions you can ask StatMuse, it’s time to put your knowledge into practice. Log in to StatMuse and ask some of these questions yourself. Or come up with your own questions.
If you’re still not quite ready to ask your own questions, you can see some of the best ones shared recently on the homepage. If you need any help, click on the live chat icon in the bottom right-hand corner or send us a message on Twitter and we’ll answer any questions you may have.
