What pace actually counts
Pace is simply a count of how many possessions a team plays in a game, and it is easy to mistake it for a proxy for excitement or effort. A slow team is not necessarily a boring or unmotivated one; it may be a team deliberately using more of the shot clock to generate a specific shot, or a team that knows more possessions favor an opponent with superior depth and wants fewer of them.
Confusing pace with quality leads to bad analysis, because the correct number of possessions for a given team is not a universal good but a function of who is on the roster and who they are playing that night.
Pace follows from personnel
A team with elite depth generally wants more possessions, because a longer game gives its bench advantage more time to compound. A team built around a small number of elite half-court shot-creators often wants fewer, more deliberate possessions, so that a larger share of the game's scoring flows through the players it trusts most rather than being decided by whichever team simply ran more.
This is why a coaching change can alter a team's pace dramatically without a single new player arriving — the new staff has made a different, reasonable judgment about which possession count suits the roster it inherited.
Pace as a contest of wills
Because pace is a lever both teams control, games often contain an explicit fight over it: a team that wants to slow the game will use the full shot clock and foul early to stop easy transition chances, while its opponent tries to force turnovers and push in transition anyway to inflate the possession count against the slower team's wishes.
Watching which team wins that fight, rather than which team simply prefers a faster style, is a more useful way to understand a game's tempo — and it explains why the same team can look completely different in pace from one opponent to the next despite an unchanged roster and an unchanged coach.