I was skeptical when Portland Trail Blazers players and coaches insisted after their Game 1 loss to the New Orleans Pelicans that they'd simply missed good shot attempts, but Second Spectrum tracking data backed up that belief. The Blazers' quantified shot quality (qSQ) of 54.9 percent -- the effective field-goal percentage we'd expect given the location and type of their shots and nearby defenders -- was the best any team had in Saturday's Game 1s. Even when we account for who was shooting using quantified shot probability (qSP), only the Golden State Warriors (56.0 percent) got better looks than Portland (55.3 percent). That's good news for the Blazers because I've found that shot making tends to be more variable from game to game than shot quality.
