Aside from the 0-12 record...

The 2014-2015 Philadelphia 76ers are on pace to break some futility records in the advanced analytics sphere -

I'll have another post in the coming days that takes a historical look at scenarios in which teams have gone from perennially mediocre to perennially good - what I found was in 25/28 cases it was done through at least one high draft pick. While this gives some credence to what Sam Hinkie and the 76ers are doing (rebuilding through the draft in hopes of landing a franchise player), the fans can't be happy with these types of performances.


Analytics done on Basketball-reference.com

Mavs 1st Half Score: 73, 76ers Whole Game Score: 70

When I saw a final score of Mavs 123 - 76ers 70, I immediately hopped on Basketball Reference to try and quantify just how poor of a performance this was for the 76ers.

One thing I noticed was that the Mavs scored 73 points in the first half and that the 76ers scored 70 for the entire game.

Curious to see if this had ever happened before - I ran a few queries on Basketball Reference and did some Excel noodling.

Here's my analytics methodology: (click hyperlink for data - did some basic joining):
1) Looked at every game with a -22 or greater first half point differential.
2) Of these games, looked at final score to see if winning team at halftime's first half scored outscored the opposing team's entire game (not necessarily winning teams entire game, for example on 11/27/96, Utah was losing to Denver 70-36 at halftime but won 107-103)
3) Based on the results above, I then had to run another query for any games where a team scored 22 or fewer points in second half + OT (if your team is down by no more than 21 at halftime, and you manage to score at least 22 points in the second half, then your opponents first half score must be lower than your overall team score for that game). Any games in this bucket (12 games) would go in the list below as well, however none met the criteria of having the team that was down at halftime not score as many points in the entire game as the team that was up at halftime.

Here's what I found - this has only happened 4 times in NBA history:

Date	Game	Halftime Score	Final Score	Differential between team down at half half-time score and team up at half final score
1/16/2002	WAS @ NJ	33-72	67-111	5
1/13/2007	MEM @ CHI	38-71	66-111	5
3/19/2008	MIA @ TOR	26-58	54-96	4
11/13/2014	PHI @ DAL	29 -73	70-123	3

Relatively speaking, this 76ers loss was the best of those four, but that's not saying much :)

Stats queried on http://www.basketball-reference.com/