Lawrence Frank, through his 12 seasons of NBA experience, has a theory that strange things happen just before and right after the All-Star break.

“Usually the week prior to the break and the week after the break, weird things happen,” Frank said recently in Boston. “If you study the history of the league and you look at the scores, you see supposed upsets, because people start to loosen their focus. It’s important for us – because we are on the other end, we are the ones stealing the wins, so to speak – to maintain our focus.”

There are upsets every night in the NBA, but they were almost a common occurrence just as Frank predicted in the week leading up to All-Star weekend. 

Let’s categorize an “upset” as a team beating another team that is four or more games ahead of them in the standings for the sake of this study. 

From last Friday, Feb. 17, to Thursday night, the official end of the first half of the season, there were nine upsets in 58 games. That plays out to 15.5% of games played.

If what Frank says is true, then we should see fewer upsets Feb. 1 to Feb. 16, right?

Over that 16-day stretch there were 130 games played and 22 were upsets, which works out to a 16.9% rate. Those numbers don’t support Frank’s theory, but this an atypical season due it being condensed and shortened. Perhaps the 2010-11 campaign is a better sample, with the post-All-Star week mentioned by Frank available for study as well.

In the seven days prior to last year’s All-Star break, there were upsets in 15 of 52 games (28.8%). In the seven days after the 2011 break there was an upset in 10 of 56 games played (17.8%). Those figures are higher than we saw this season, but they have to be taken in context. Was there more parity in the NBA a year ago?

Not really. There were four teams that won seventy percent (or more) of their games and there are three so far this year. In 2010-11, four teams won less than thirty percent of their games. This season there are six through the first half.