Panathinaikos are scoring worse than they did a year ago. They are also the best team in the league by a distance, and the reason is sitting in the other column.

Over the same first six games, their offence is down 5.4 points per 100 possessions and their defence is better by 21.3. Net, they have improved by 16 points per 100, more than any club in the competition, and almost none of it came from the end everybody watches.

That is the kind of thing Better or Worse? for teams exists to find.

What it does

It measures a club against itself a year ago, over the same number of games.

x games this season against the first x of last season, so a good start is never flattered by being compared to a full year that included the bad nights. The headline is Net Rating, points scored minus points conceded per 100 possessions, which is the cleanest way to say whether a team is actually better rather than luckier.

Which end changed

A club improving by eight points per 100 tells you almost nothing on its own. The useful question is where it came from, and the tool splits every team into offence and defence.

Three patterns are running this season.

Teams that got better by defending: Panathinaikos, as above, and Partizan, whose defence is 17.2 better while their offence has fallen 8.6. Both clubs are winning differently than they did a year ago.

Teams that got better by scoring: Real Madrid are 9.9 better in offence and 6.4 worse in defence, which is a fair description of their season so far. Olympiacos and Bayern are in the same group.

Teams that improved at both ends: Fenerbahce, up 7.0 in offence and 2.8 in defence, and Valencia, up 3.2 and 6.1. Those are the two cleanest improvements in the league, and both sit near the top of the table.

Better does not always mean winning

Bayern are 6.3 points per 100 better than last season and have two wins from six. Improvement and results are not the same thing in October, and a tool that measures one will not tell you about the other.

It reads the other way too. Zalgiris are 13.2 worse, with both ends down, the sharpest fall in the league. Milan are 12.8 worse. Those are the two clubs whose seasons look least like the ones they had a year ago.

Free, for everybody

No account, no paywall, no limits. Open it, find your club, send the link to the person who insists nothing has changed.

A free account adds only one thing: you can save what you found and return to it later, when there are twenty games behind the numbers instead of six.

One gap worth knowing about. Besiktas do not appear, because they were not in the EuroLeague last season and there is nothing to measure them against. Nineteen clubs have a past here. The twentieth is building one.

The same question, asked about individuals, is at Better or Worse? for players, and we wrote about what it found last week.