NBA 2017-18: Top 5 Offenses Of The Regular Season
The NBA season is about to end quite soon.
Cleveland is down 3-0 to Golden State in the NBA Finals, and teams with a 3-0 lead in the Finals have a 13-0 record thus far. Nothing we've seen in the series serves to suggest the presence of any ray of hope for the Cavaliers, and it's about time we drew curtains on the 2017-18 season and took a look back at how the season panned out for the entire league.
The regular season campaign saw the emergence of a new superteam in H-Town. The Rockets razzled and dazzled teams all along the way to usurping the #1 seed from the Warriors for the first time in 4 seasons, and they looked primed to upset them in the Conference Finals.
In the other conference, Kyrie Irving's move from Cleveland to Boston caused a seismic shift in the balance of Eastern Conference power, as the Cavaliers slid to the 4th spot in the regular season Eastern Conference standings. The Toronto Raptors emerged from the regular season with the second-best record in the league and were hyped to end LeBron's reign of terror in the Eastern Conference.
Neither of the aforementioned scenarios bore fruit, but this takes nothing away from the efforts of these teams through the 82-game regular season. Let's take a look at the most potent offensive teams through the campaign:
#5 Cleveland Cavaliers - 110.6 points per 100 possessions
The Cleveland Cavaliers were just a bad defensive team, ranking 29th out of 30 teams in the league in defensive efficiency over 82 games of the regular season. The only reason they made it to the playoffs was the fact that their offensive efficiency ranked 5th in the league.
LeBron James is responsible for the majority of the plays they made on the offensive end of the ball. He averaged 27.5 points per game, ranking 3rd in the league in scoring per game on a field goal percentage of 54.2% from the floor while converting 36.7% of his 3-pointers. He also logged 9.1 assists per game, ranking second in the league for the same behind only Russell Westbrook.
Other than LeBron, the Cavs got solid contributions on offense from the likes of Kevin Love, Jeff Green, Larry Nance Jr, Jordan Clarkson and Kyle Korver. They ranked 6th in 3-point percentage mainly due to the presence of all those sharpshooters on their roster.