Stats Review: Valencia’s fastbreak formula and Barça’s defensive wall

Valencia leads the charge in transition scoring while Barcelona locks down the fast break

The midpoint of the EuroLeague Regular Season has arrived and now is a good time to check in with the trends shaping the league at the moment. With parity as healthy as ever - with two wins separating first and 10th place and league-wide offensive efficiency rebounding from a brief lull to once again sit within striking distance of the modern record, the league’s two defining trends have held as well as could be expected through the first half of the season.

The source of that offensive rebound in recent rounds, however, was perhaps not as predictable, nor was its subsequent impact on the standings.

It is extremely difficult to push tempo in the EuroLeague. Defenses are simply too competitive to allow for the slippage in intensity that tends to lead to easy opportunities in the open floor. However, since the move to 18 teams during the 2019-20 regular season, transition scoring has risen incrementally. That was not surprising when efficiency took some time to recover in the years following the pandemic and with several of the new teams joining since then, but even with efficiency at peak levels this year, transition scoring has continued to climb.

While 12.2 points per game in transition is only a modest jump from the 11.6 per game teams averaged a year ago, the fact that teams are finding success pushing the ball is surprising. It cannot be traced to the new additions to the league. While Valencia Basket leads all teams in scoring 17.9 transition points per game, Hapoel IBI Tel Aviv is scoring only 7.7 points per game - the lowest mark of any team since the 2022-23 season. There are a few more subtle factors at play: teams have been marginally more aggressive to push off misses and makes and have done a better job taking care of the ball when they have looked to run.

The growth of transition play, however subtle, has nonetheless opened the door for teams to build an advantage there, and no team has done a better job pushing to score and preventing their opponents from doing so than Valencia, which rose to the top of the standings last week. Leading all teams in transition scoring while ranking fifth in points allowed, its consistency shooting the three in the open floor and efforts to get back and identify shooters on the perimeter has already helped Valencia nearly eclipse its total win count from the team's most recent EuroLeague season.

FC Barcelona falls on the other end of the spectrum in terms of how it has built its scoring margin; Barça has allowed only 7.6 points per game in transition - one of the better efforts over the last decade. Given that it ranks right around average in offensive turnover rate and all teams are vulnerable to the occasional fast break runout, the work Barcelona has done on the margins to not only prevent teams from finding opportunities in early offense but force turnovers as well is nothing short of spectacular.

While speed is a key characteristic of Paris Basketball’s offense as it plays at the fastest pace in recent EuroLeague history, teams like AS Monaco, Virtus Bologna, and Zalgiris Kaunas have been able find an advantage with their tempo as well. Efficiency plays a role in the success of those teams as Zalgiris, in particular, has shot the lights out when it has pushed, and Monaco has managed to protect the rim at an exceptional level when running back on defense.

Although transition opportunities remain difficult to come by many nights in the EuroLeague, the teams above have found multiple routes to a rare advantage.