After last night, the Warriors are 15th in the league at 20.78 assists per game. That doesn’t make sense on the surface considering they’re 2nd in scoring.

The Lakers are 1st in scoring, 2nd in assists behind Utah (the Jazz are 7th in scoring).

The Suns are 3rd in scoring, 4th in assists.

The Knicks are 4th in scoring, 8th in assists.

While the Celtics are “just” 9th in scoring, they’re 3rd in assists.

What’s hurting the Warriors is the fact they’re 29th out of 30 teams in assists by opponents, 24.10. They’re also 28th in difference at -3.31.

Checking some stats, I came up with a few things that stand out overall.

First of all, here’s the breakdown of assists the Warriors have had compared to their opponents:

Assists       GSW        OPP

-------       ---        ---

10-14          4          0

15-19         17          8

20-24         25         27

25-29         11         14

30+            0          8

As you’d probably expect, the majority of the games fall in that 20-24 range. It fits right in with the averages.

The big difference is at the upper and lower ends, especially the extremes. The Warriors have had 21 games with 19 or fewer assists compared to 8 by the opposition. On the other hand, opponents have had 25 or more 22 times compared to only 11 by the Warriors.

It goes deeper than that.

Overall, after counting things up I found the Warriors have had almost exactly the same number of games above their average (28) as below (29). I didn’t run the figures for the opponents, but I’m going to assume based on the overall breakdown it’s going to be very close to above and below the 24 they allow.

Of the 28 games with 21 or more assists, 17 were at home (10-7 record) while 11 were on the road (1-10).

Of the 29 games with 20 or fewer assists, 10 were at home (5-5 record) while 19 were on the road (4-15).

They’ve actually got a better road record when they get fewer assists, which probably means they’ve limited the other team to fewer as well, pulled a couple wins out they probably shouldn’t have had, or were carried by a big performance (Crawford’s 50 in Charlotte came in a game where they only had 18 assists).

(NOTE: somewhere along the way it looks like I mistakenly put one home game into the road column, but I don’t think it changes things all that much and it took too long for me to do this to go back through everything one by one and find it)

We can break things down a couple different ways: with and without Crawford and with and without Ellis.

Before the Crawford trade, the Warriors played 13 games and recorded 21 or more assists in just 3 of them. 2 of those 3 were at home. They actually won the only road game they had over 21 assists in, going 1-4 in the rest.

Since getting Crawford, they’ve done a better job of dishing out more assists, but as you’d probably expect they’re likely giving up more as well. With him, they’ve recorded 21 or more assists 25 times, 20 or fewer 19 times. They’ve been at 21 or more about 75% of the time at home, just over 40% on the road.

Oddly, they’ve lost all 10 road games when getting 21 or more assists since trading for Crawford (3-11 when at 20 or fewer). Their winning percentage at home with Crawford is the same no matter how many assists they get (60%).

Without Ellis, they had a couple more games with 20 or fewer assists (23 to 21, counting last night’s game) and were almost even at home, including a 9-9 record overall.

With him, they had 7 games of 21 or more, 6 games of 20 or fewer, and they were at 21 or more in 7 of their 9 home games (5-2 compared to 1-1), 0 of their 4 road games (0-4).

What does it all mean? Probably not a whole lot. We already know the Warriors have a lot of games where they play more selfishly than usual, lowlighted by those 4 games where they failed to top 15 assists, but I expected more high-assist games (30+) to balance out some of the mid-teens. Instead, they had none while allowing 6 and even gave up more in the 25-29 range.

For a team so good at scoring, they sure don’t reflect it in the assist totals. I guess we can take some solace in the fact that with them last in points allowed, at least they allow a lot of assists as well. Or something.

In 57 games, who has had more assists?

Warriors: 11 (19%)
Opponents: 40 (70%)
Even: 6 (11%)

The Warriors had 20 assists 8 times, the most of any total. After that, they had 18 or 21 a total of 6 times, followed by 24 at 5 times. 29 in one game is their highest, done 3 times. They had 11 once, 13 twice, 14 once and 15 twice.

The opponents had 23 assists 8 times, followed by 20, 22, 24 or 26 a total of 6 times. They had 30 twice, 33 twice, 35 three times and 36 once. They had 15, 16, 17 and 18 only once.