Stats review: Using efficiency to reexamine the standings

When we compare offensive and defensive efficiency marks to the standings, does everything match up?

The Turkish Airlines EuroLeague returned from hiatus last week with several teams securing important road wins, numerous standout individual performances, and the movement throughout the standings that — at this point — feels like a weekly tradition. With only seven games remaining, the tension of each round is set to ramp up quickly as the margin for error for teams in the middle of the playoff hunt remains razor-thin.

The table above lists the top 13 teams in the standings. Coincidentally, that covers the teams with this season’s 13 highest efficiency differentials, or the number of points per possession a team has scored minus those that they have allowed. While the teams match by name, the order in which they appear has been wildly different so far this season as many teams are currently outperforming their placement in the standings.

While things begin simply enough with Olympiacos Piraeus, whose performance on the offensive end and consistency starting and finishing games has paced it to the top of the standings and the top efficiency differential, the similarities end there. Partizan Mozzart Bet Belgrade has built the league’s second-best body of work on paper following its win over Baskonia Vitoria-Gasteiz but currently sits in the Play-In Showdown zone in the standings. While some of that can be attributed to Partizan’s remaining strength of schedule — it will be the team whose results dictate a great deal of how the season will play out from here as it visits Olympiacos this week before taking on all three of the teams on the outside looking in for postseason qualification and two teams currently positioned to appear in the Play-In games — Partizan's 1-5 record in games decided by 5 points or fewer reveals the harsh reality of this EuroLeague season.

Playing good basketball is no longer good enough in the EuroLeague; when a team plays well has become nearly just as important. Partizan has been one of the league’s most balanced teams, especially since the calendar turned to 2025, but a couple of early losses in one-possession games have suppressed its placement in the standings months after the fact.

Just one spot ahead of Partizan in the standings is FC Bayern Munich, whose league-best 7-1 record in close games has kept it in the thick of things to avoid a Play-In matchup. While Bayern's inconsistency defensively has hurt it on the road, it has delivered in a lot of big moments this season to compensate.

Fenerbahce Beko Istanbul and Paris Basketball are the two high seeds ranked in the bottom half of the league in efficiency differential. While Paris’s stop in the standings is not hard to figure out given it won 10 consecutive games at one point, Fenerbahce’s is more complicated as its character and quality as a team has shown much more clearly in wins than in the couple of surprising blowout losses it has suffered on the year.

With some of the league’s best efficiency differentials and most successful clubs in recent history on the edge of the standings, it will be fascinating to see if Real Madrid, FC Barcelona, and Anadolu Efes Istanbul can prove that they are indeed sleeping giants over the next month in a half.

What all of this proves is that, perhaps as much as any season of any elite league in recent history, the #EveryGameMatters marketing is not hyperbole; the 2024-25 EuroLeague has found the sweet spot. Games that were played in the first month of the season are still lifting or haunting some teams while others continue to wait for a regression to the mean into the waning moments of the regular season. Getting to watch how things play out over the final weeks of the season is something we should not take for granted.