Los Angeles Lakers: Statistical Dissection of the Team's Road Woes

On Wednesday night, the Los Angeles Lakers suffered yet another heart-wrenching road loss in the nation's capital.

With the loss, the Lakers fell to 6-14 on the road, raising numerous questions about the team's abilities away from the comforts of the Staples Center.

Trying to figure out why the Lakers lose so frequently is difficult. One can point to many reasons. Among them are Kobe's poor performances, turnovers, horrible three-point shooting, back-to-back situations, lack of a deep bench and free-throw shooting. 

So how do we figure out which factor has affected the Lakers the most?

Well, by simply using math!

After running a regression on these five variables against road losses, it turns out that three-point shooting percentage had the highest statistical significance, followed by back-to-back situations.

To put things into layman's terms rather than nerd vocabulary: The Lakers shoot and miss too many threes in road losses and they've suffered numerous times on the second game of back-to-backs on the road.

As seen in the table above, the Lakers shoot significantly worse from the three-point line in losses. Laker fans may remember a game against the Portland Trail Blazers earlier in the season, when they hit a grand total of zero three-pointers. It's games like this that hurt the Lakers. They need to pound the rock inside to their bigs more often, and make use of their size.

Interestingly, the Lakers shoot worse from the free-throw line in road wins and also commit more turnovers. That being said, these factors were not statistically significant, which means they don't really determine Laker road wins or losses.

Another factor that has taken a major toll on the Lakers are back-to-back situations. The condensed schedule has been brutal for the NBA, but the second game of back-to-backs on the road have been especially challenging for the Lake Show.

Not only have they performed poorly in them; they've had a lot of them. From the 20 games the Lakers have played on the road, a whopping ten of them have been the second game of back-to-backs. This means the Lakers are arriving late into airports after a long night of basketball and it's obviously causing problems for the team the following night.

In the regression analysis, back-to-backs weren't statistically significant, but they were the second-most important variable. One must also take into account the small sample size. With a larger sample size, there may have been more evidence that the second game of back-to-backs are detrimental to the Lakers' road record. 

In layman's terms, back-to-back situations aren't a great factor in Laker losses, but they're a bigger factor than the other variables.The Lakers are 2-8 in the brutal second game of the back-to-back on the road this season, compared to 4-6 in games where they get a chance to rest. However, the two-game difference between the records isn't really enough to say that it's a major reason why the Lakers are struggling on the road overall.

That being said, in the playoffs there are no back-to-backs, and it won't hurt the Lakers.

The most interesting variable which I personally thought would be statistically significant was Kobe's field goal percentage.

Too many times we've seen Kobe try to take over a game and he's just simply failed. In fact, we've seen it twice this week. However, as you can see in the table above, the field goal percentage in road wins and road losses for Kobe is pretty much the same.

However, looking deeper into the stats, we find two instances where Kobe shot poorly in road wins. Since the sample size for road wins is so small, those two poor shooting games skew the true nature of Kobe's effect in road losses.

Excluding those two data points, we see that Kobe's field goal percentage becomes far more of a significant variable. It still isn't statistically significant, but it becomes just as significant of a factor as back-to-back situations. 

In layman's terms, Kobe shoots 44.6 percent in road wins without those two games, far higher than the 39.1 percent he shoots in road losses.

In other words, stop shooting, Kobe! Pass the ball! Use your teammates!

If the Lakers clean up their three-point shooting, or just stop shooting them all together (they're last in the league), and if Kobe can facilitate rather than try to dominate, the Lakers could improve on the road. 

Unfortunately for them, they can't do anything about the schedule, but they won't have to worry about that in the playoffs.

Follow Andre Khatchaturian on Twitter.