Basketball Statistics Blog

Friday Press Clippings:
The biggest fallacy in sports is that the better team will win, so ...
Why Better Teams Lose ?

From Hoop Theory
By David
Download source here: ' Why Better Teams Lose ? ' by David

"... Matt once told me that “the biggest fallacy in sports is that the better team will win.” This is an interesting statement, especially in light of the unexpected results from the early rounds of the NBA Playoffs this year. Matt’s statement can be understood in two ways. ..."

"... The second way to look at Matt’s fallacy is actually more interesting. Variance tells us that the better team won’t always win, but the truth is we don’t know who the better team actually is. To explain this point, it will be helpful to use the playoffs as a vehicle. ..."

"... This means that win-loss records and point differentials are imperfect exogenous indicators of who the better of two teams is. The very nature of being “better” than another team is relative; it depends entirely on the comparison between the two teams.

Knowing how well each team played against the rest of the league tells us something, and is often a good indicator of who will win between two teams, but it’s not perfect, and nuance escapes it. ..."

"... We could look at how two teams played against each other during the regular season, but the sample size is just too small to say anything meaningful.

The 4 games two conference rivals play during the regular season do not give us enough data to say meaningful things about which team is superior, and we have even less data on individual player matchups.

After factoring in other variables like injuries, fatigue, and varying degrees of effort we aren’t left with much information to make meaningful predictions about a playoff matchup. ..."

"... As Justin has pointed out, we need better ways to manipulate smaller data sets; until we can draw meaningful conclusions from fewer observations we are handicapped in predictive analysis. That doesn’t mean we won’t get there, and this is certainly something we’ll be working on in the future. ..."

"... Each possession has a variance of about 1 point, so if we assume possessions are independent events (not a great assumption and certainly something you should check in the data, but ok as a starting point) the point differential on 800 possessions has a variance of 800 or a standard deviation of about 28.

This overly simple analysis seems to imply that the Mavs may be just as good as the Lakers (even in this particular matchup), but just ran two standard deviations over expectation over the course of the series. Such a 2 sigma event is rare, but might still happen almost 2.5 percent of the time (If they really are equally good teams the Lakers might have beat the Mavs by 56 points over the course of 4 games 2.5 percent of the time). ..."

Read more articles in Hoop Theory.

To read today's 'Press Clippings' in Spanish,
click this week above on the 'Español' tab or afterwards click here:
' El punto G ~ Notas de pensamiento esférico '
by ABC Blogs.

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Father and Daughter

Father and Daughter

Oscar 2000 to the Best Short Film Animated - from Michaël Dudok de Wit, Holland

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