NBA teams all want to play faster -- but it might be making them worse

Like elaborate Halloween decorations and the changing color of leaves, the refrain comes every fall: NBA teams say they want to play faster.

This season, the New York Knicks wanted to play faster. The Orlando Magic wanted to play faster. The Portland Trail Blazers wanted to play faster. The Miami Heat wanted to play faster. The Memphis Grizzlies wanted to play faster. The Chicago Bulls wanted to play faster.

And that's just a list of teams generated with a quick internet search. Potentially, all 30 coaching staffs had at least some discussion about playing faster this season; the NBA's current "pace-and-space" era, after all, starts with pace, and a record 18 teams are averaging at least 100 possessions per game. A decade ago, only two teams -- including the 73-win Golden State Warriors -- reached triple digits.

"You always wish you could play faster. You want to play faster," Knicks coach Mike Brown said. "We're efficient when we play fast, and we want to keep doing it as much as we can."

The idea is that playing faster leads to better offense. But a surprising pattern has emerged this season: The fastest teams are worse at offense, while the slowest teams are better.

Out of the top 10 teams this season in pace, not one ranks in the top 10 in offensive efficiency, and only two -- the Atlanta Hawks and Minnesota Timberwolves -- are in the top eight in the standings in either conference. Three of the four worst offenses in the league rank among the pace leaders.

Meanwhile, out of the bottom 10 teams in pace, five rank among the top 10 in offensive efficiency, and seven are in playoff position. Three of the five best offenses in the league -- the Boston Celtics, New York and the Charlotte Hornets -- rank among the pace laggards. And the most efficient offense, the Denver Nuggets, is 20th in pace, just one spot out of the bottom 10.

On average, the 10 slowest teams have outscored the 10 fastest teams by 3.1 points per 100 possessions. That's the largest gap in the NBA advanced stats database, which dates to 1996-97.

ESPN spoke with coaches, players and front office members around the league to explore the reasons behind this counterintuitive phenomenon, and what it could mean for the upcoming playoffs.

Note: Stats are through April 7's games.

Faster process, worse results

To understand the unexpected mismatch between pace and efficiency this season, the first place to look is, surprisingly, the field of monetary policy and a piece of philosophical wisdom called Goodhart's Law. Named after Charles Goodhart, a British economist from the mid-20th century, it states, "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

In other words, if a team knows that quick shots tend to be better, then it might warp its offensive approach for the main purpose of generating quick shots -- which can, ironically, produce worse results.

As Bulls coach Billy Donovan said, "Clearly, analytically across the board, shots within the first seven seconds are the highest-percentage shots you're going to get. ... [But] if you come down and are taking quick, contested 3-point shots that are highly under duress, you're probably, even in the first seven seconds, not going to have a really good rating."

Focusing on a faster pace at the exclusion of other offensive priorities can also pose a problem. When asked about the disconnect between pace and offensive success, numerous coaches and players from fast-paced teams blamed turnovers and a lack of offensive rebounds, which tend to come with a fast-paced offensive system.

"If you look at our shot profile, we're generating really, really good shots," Donovan said. Indeed, the Bulls rank third in quantified shot quality, according to GeniusIQ, based on factors such as shot location and defender distance.

"But that's only part of it," Donovan continued. "You've got to manufacture other ways to score, too, right? So that's why taking care of the basketball and blocking out and rebounding become really critical."

The Bulls' pace might help them generate "really, really good" shots, but they rank 20th in turnover rate, 22nd in free throw rate and 26th in offensive rebounding rate. Shooting is only one of the "Four Factors" identified by Dean Oliver as contributing to success in a game, and below-average performance in the other three is why Chicago ranks 24th in overall offensive efficiency.

There also appears to be a form of selection bias influencing the type of teams that resorted to a faster pace this season. "Generally, it's what teams without an elite offensive talent go with," one Eastern Conference analyst said.

Only five All-Stars came from teams that rank in the top 10 in pace: Miami's Norman Powell, Atlanta's Jalen Johnson, Portland's Deni Avdija, Indiana's Pascal Siakam and Minnesota's Anthony Edwards. Of that group, only Edwards is considered a top-tier superstar.

Conversely, a dozen All-Stars came from teams that rank in the bottom 10 in pace, including a number of top-tier superstars: Luka Doncic, LeBron James, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Devin Booker, Jalen Brunson, Karl-Anthony Towns, Kawhi Leonard, Kevin Durant, Jaylen Brown and more.

Put another way: Better pace can't compensate for worse talent. So it's only natural that faster-paced teams would produce worse results on the court, regardless of the system they employ to attempt to bridge that talent gap.

That imbalance is why the correlation between pace and offensive rating this season is negative-0.42. That's on a scale where negative numbers mean an inverse correlation -- in this case, saying that faster pace correlates with worse offense. It's by far the largest negative correlation in the recorded history of these stats.

Correlation Between Pace and Offensive Rating

Slower, starrier, superior

For slower teams, meanwhile, a more deliberate pace often arises because of their superior personnel.

"A lot of the better teams, they do have a slower pace," LA Clippers coach Tyronn Lue said in late January, just before his team traded James Harden and Ivica Zubac. "I think because you're playing with stars or guys that are max players, they're going to slow the offense down because you want to play through them and get the ball in their hands."

One player who fits that bill is three-time MVP Nikola Jokic, and his coach agreed with this explanation. "We have a person we can play through that allows us to be efficient, especially in the last half of the shot clock," Nuggets coach David Adelman said. "I do believe in pace with certain rosters. Our roster is not built that way."

It might seem strange for Adelman to oversee a team that isn't operating at turbo speed. Growing up, he watched his father, longtime NBA coach Rick Adelman, lead fast-paced teams such as Portland and the Sacramento Kings on deep playoff runs.

But later in the senior Adelman's coaching career, he also led a slower, more deliberate roster in Houston to multiple 50-win seasons. The lesson for his son was adaptability.

"I think there's a million ways to get it done," David Adelman said. "For me, historically, looking back at some of these teams I got to watch growing up, some of them played fast, some of them played real slow. ... Whatever your roster is, try to complement that roster. Don't reach to be something different that you're not. Take what you have and do the best you can with that group."

Coaches for slower, better teams also said they focus less on overall pace than on more granular measurements of offensive tempo.

"I honestly don't know how to define pace," Celtics coach Joe Mazzulla said. "There's like three or four different ways you can go about it. We have our own definition based on what maximizes the guys that we have in the way that we want to play, and how quickly we could get the type of shots that we want to get and the spacing that we want."

For another example, one might expect the surging Hornets to be succeeding because of their speed. Young teams typically play faster, and the Hornets have the NBA's third-youngest rotation, per Basketball Reference. But in reality, the Hornets rank 26th in pace.

Charlotte coach Charles Lee said that rather than stress overall pace, he's instead happy with how his team employs selective bursts of speed. "We're getting to actions, I think, pretty quickly," he said. "[On] pick-and-rolls, we're sprinting into them."

That approach is working: Charlotte profiles as a dangerous playoff team because it has the league's best offense since Jan. 1 and the No. 5 unit overall.

Playoff implications

This unusual relationship between speed and efficiency carries crucial implications for the upcoming postseason, where fans tuning in to the most important games could be in for an unexpectedly throwback style of play.

In general, the NBA game slows as the stakes rise. In 27 out of 28 seasons since 1996-97, pace has declined in the playoffs compared to the regular season. On average, pace has fallen by 2.7 possessions per 48 minutes in the postseason.

That's not because it's typically slower-paced teams that make deep playoff runs. Instead, more than 90% of the postseason pace decline is attributable to a change in the playoff atmosphere specifically rather than the identities of the teams involved.

Leaguewide Pace

But this season, while a few contenders rank in the middle of the pack in pace, most of the league's best teams are on the slower side, and none of the fastest teams profile as top-tier contenders.

So if pace tends to decline in the postseason, regardless of team identity, and now the slower teams are more likely to appear in more playoff games, then the 2025-26 playoffs could be positioned for a massive reduction -- a return to a more old-school basketball approach.

It's possible to take that conclusion too far. Even the Celtics, who are last in the league in pace this season, still rank in the top half of all teams since 1996-97.

But the likely outcome over the next two months is a different game, with more emphasis on half-court offense, isolation play (which increases in frequency every year in the playoffs) and grind it out possessions than is typical of an NBA game in 2026.

That style of play could benefit the No. 1 seeds in each conference, the Oklahoma City Thunder and the Detroit Pistons, who boast by far the top two half-court defenses in the league. The San Antonio Spurs are equally stingy when Victor Wembanyama is on the court. (Granted, the Thunder also lead the league in transition defense, per Cleaning the Glass.)

Ironically, despite the trend of slower being better this season, coaches for the league's lowest-paced teams still talk about their desire to play with more tempo -- perhaps because when the game slows, scarcity means that every easy basket becomes more valuable.

"You don't want to be last in anything, so there's obviously positions that we could be better at as far as the pace that we play," Mazzulla said.

"We'd like to improve our pace, not be 29th," Houston Rockets coach Ime Udoka said.

And before a game in late January, Clippers coach Lue lamented, "I would love to play faster ... but our team doesn't fit that style." After being reminded that his team ranked No. 3 in offense since an awful start even with a slow pace, Lue laughed and continued with his line of thought.

"We could be No. 1 if we played faster," Lue said. "Because we're so good in transition, but we just don't get enough opportunities."

Indeed, the Clippers lead the league in points per transition play, according to Cleaning the Glass -- but until the trade deadline, they ranked last in transition frequency.

It's no wonder that after the Clippers traded the more methodical Harden for the younger, zippier Darius Garland, the first topic Lue discussed was that now his team could "play different with a faster pace."

At the same time, conversely, Garland's old team in Cleveland has slowed significantly since it added Harden. The Cleveland Cavaliers ranked eighth in pace before Harden arrived but have fallen to 24th since.

However, Cleveland has risen to fourth in offensive efficiency since Harden's debut. That's a worthy tradeoff for Cavaliers coach Kenny Atkinson, who offered a fitting summary of how this unusual trend is working in practice.

"Yes, we're playing slower, but we're still an efficient offensive team," Atkinson said. "It's not like I'm in the locker room [saying], 'Man, we've got to get back to playing fast.' None of that. We've got to play to our strengths and our personnel. If it's a little slower, so be it."