Rest vs. Rust in the NBA Playoffs

With the Phoenix Suns finishing off their sweep of Denver last night, and at least 2 games remaining in every other series, the Suns are going to be getting a little time off, which led to the question of whether there is a limit to how much rest is good for a team in the playoffs, and which team the Suns should be rooting for during the remainder of the other Western Conference semifinal series between the Jazz and the Clippers. I went back through the entire playoff history of the NBA to find every instance where a team had at least 3 days more rest than their opponent to try to figure out what the historical odds say.

First of all, there have been 207 cases in NBA history where one team has at least 3 days more rest than their opponent. In those series, the team with more rest has won that series 68.6% of the time, which is a good sign for Phoenix. But, when you break it down by whether the team with more rest had home court advantage, you see that home court makes a huge difference.

Among all series in NBA playoff history, the higher seed has won 73.6% of the time, which goes to show that home court advantage is important, although a good chunk of that win percentage can also be attributed to the better team being awarded the home court advantage. When the higher seed also has at least 3 days more rest, their win percentage jumps up to 80.8%, while the win percentage for lower seeds with more rest increases from 26.4% to 35.7%. This means that overall, having significantly more rest than your opponent increases your overall odds of winning a series by about 8%.

There is also the question of how those odds change based on the length of the difference in rest. For cases where the higher seed has more rest, the odds peak at around 5 days more rest, then decline slightly as the rest difference reaches 7, then climbs sharply once the difference exceeds a week (although most cases where this has happened were during seasons where top seeds were awarded a first-round bye, which hasn't been the case since 1983). For lower seeds, the odds continue to increase with every extra day of rest.

So, what does that mean when applied to Phoenix's current situation? It means that the optimal situation for Phoenix would be for the LA Clippers to win their series in 6 games, which would require them to win the next 3 games in a row, in the process achieving something never done in franchise history, a berth in the conference finals. The remaining scenarios, in order from best to worst for Phoenix, would be Clippers in 7, Jazz in 7, Jazz in 6, and Jazz in 5, meaning that the more wins for the Clippers, the better for Phoenix.