# In your opinion which team is going to be the worst in the league next season?



## UOSean (Jul 7, 2005)

Looking at Atlanta's team their gonna be bad, Charlotte looks like they're gonna be pretty bad, NY is totally up in the air for me and if PDX sends off Zach and Miles for a sack of potatos with expiring contracts they will undoubtedly stink. What do you all think? Who will be the worst in the league?


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## handclap problematic (Nov 6, 2003)

I think all of the above will be bad....however, I feel a team or two will surprise us and completely suck out of the blue. It seems to happen every year. Last year, with the injuries to McGrady and Yao, it was Houston. This year.....not so sure. Some team will probably lose some starters to injury and just completely die in the water.

Prunetang


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## GOD (Jun 22, 2003)

I don't think it will be the Blazers, although we will be in the bottom 5 most likely. I think the worst team will be Atlanta. Other bad teams, Charlotte, Seattle, Golden State, and the shocker will be NO/OK. Come to think of it, I think the Blazers will have a legit shot at the bottom spot. But give us two years, Oden, Mayo, and I think we will break .500 (joke)


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## Utherhimo (Feb 20, 2005)

i would say the spurs could be one of the worst teams

just like in 87 - david
97- ducan
07- oden? 

seems to be a trend here


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## mediocre man (Feb 24, 2004)

The Blazers will be the worst team. We have pretty much the same team as we did last year,with the same coach and his philosophy. What is most likely to happen is this.

Joel will get injured and miss a decent amount of games
Darius will lose his desire about a 1/3 of the way in and be a negative in the locker room
Zach will put up great numbers but refuse to pass and get anyone else involved
Webster, Roy and Dixon will complain because there will be no set rotation by Nate
Blake will start at point, play one good game followed by 2-3 bad ones. 


I'm not sure why anyone at this point is excited about the immediate future of the team. Hopefully I'm wrong about Nate this year and he sticks with one line-up the entire year. If someone gets hurt then he replaces them opnly until they are healthy again then inserts them back into their pre injured spot. Aldridge won't be a factor this season, which is alright because down the road he will be a very good player.


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## BlayZa (Dec 31, 2002)

im not sure if im buying that Cha or NO will be worse than us.

tyson chandler
hilton armstrong
peja
d-mason
cp3

pretty decent starting 5 even with a Rookie at the PF for NO 

and

brezec
okafor
morrison
wallace
felton

not a bad lineup there - i think we are on par with this group 


id say its out of atlanta , ny and assuming tmac and yao get injured like normal - houston.


i think a team that is looking good for next year is the grizz

j.west is doing some good things there and has amassed a lot of good talent

miller, gasol, swift, damon , jones , warrick , and they just picked up rudy gay for next to nothing.


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## billfindlay10 (Jan 24, 2003)

BlayZa said:


> im not sure if im buying that Cha or NO will be worse than us.
> 
> tyson chandler
> hilton armstrong
> ...


What happened to David West with the Hornet's....I am sure he will start over Hilton Armstrong.


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## UOSean (Jul 7, 2005)

Personally I hope the Blazers drop Zach and Miles for a sack of potatoes with expiring contracts and have fun watching Roy, JJ, Aldridge, Webster, Prizz and co grow together while they get their butts handed to them, cross our fingers and collect ODEN or one of the other top centers in next years draft.

JJ
ROY
Webster/Outlaw
Aldridge
Oden (w/ Prizz off the bench)

That team would be contenders for years. We'd be a defensive jugernaut. The defense alone would bring a couple championships to PDX. I think a top center/big out of this draft would be worth losing big this year. Screw having just enough to compete or make the playoffs. Lose big for one more year, pick up one more big time talent next year and rock the league for years.


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## azsun18 (Aug 12, 2004)

Atlanta will be the worse, especially if they trade AH for just a trade exception. Because we all know that the Atlanta owner wont use it to get a player. I think we will be above Seattle in our division depending on what they do with wilcox.


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## For Three! Rip City! (Nov 11, 2003)

While it will be more fun to watch the Blazers this year I think we're looking at another long season. We'll be one of the bottom three this year.

Now after next year's draft I think we'll see substantial improvement for the 2007-2008 season. My hope and expectation is that we'll possibly be looking at a playoff push that early. This year though?
Expect nothing and you won't be disappointed.


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## azsun18 (Aug 12, 2004)

If Joel does get hurt we are in much better shape to fill the hole at center then we were last year. With Skinner, RL, and LA we can man the postion better then with HA and Zach (Theo was always hurt). Just having more big bodies should help our rebounding.


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## RedHot&Rolling (Jun 26, 2004)

I'll take a stab at this. Here's my bottom 5.

5. Toronto
4. Seattle
3. Minnesota
2. Portland
1. Orlando

Although, post-trade I'll go with the 76ers. Without AI - they'll be horrid.


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## Ed O (Dec 30, 2002)

Atlanta and Portland will, once again, be battling for the worst in the NBA.

Ed O.


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## Scout226 (Sep 17, 2003)

Ed O said:


> Atlanta and Portland will, once again, be battling for the worst in the NBA.
> 
> Ed O.


But looking at the draft class next year, that's a good thing, right?


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## Coatesvillain (Jul 17, 2002)

RedHot&Rolling said:


> I'll take a stab at this. Here's my bottom 5.
> 
> 5. Toronto
> 4. Seattle
> ...


Orlando? They're a lot closer to top five than bottom five.

And to answer the question, I think Portland will be the worst team in the league this year.


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## Public Defender (May 5, 2003)

Worst 5 (worst being #1, fifth worst as #5)

1.) Atlanta
2.) Toronto
3.) New York
4.) Portland
5.) Charlotte

Atlanta, because they actually look worse than the Blazers on paper. Toronto because they're the team with the most intractable "losing tradition" these days. The Knicks because they found the one way to make the team worse - have the incompetent guy who put this team together become the coach. The Blazers, because, well, they're young and unpredictable. And Charlotte for the same reason - except that they play in the East and will pick up a few more wins as a result.


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## deanwoof (Mar 10, 2003)

seattle should be one of the bottom teams this year. as will washington. both of the teams didnt improve at all through the draft and free agency.


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## Storyteller (Dec 31, 2002)

Atlanta and NY will stink it up in the East. Charlotte will be a step ahead of both but won't be contending for any playoff spots yet.

Portland could very well be the worst team in the West again - especially if Randolph is dealt.


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## Ed O (Dec 30, 2002)

Scout226 said:


> But looking at the draft class next year, that's a good thing, right?


Believe me, my friend, between the moves that we made on draft day and the prospects in 2007? I won't be complaining about much this year if we're battling for worst in the NBA.

Ed O.


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## Ron Mexico (Feb 14, 2004)

portland


but what if seattle got the #1 pick next year... another 1st round C?? or would they go elsewhere


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## dudleysghost (Mar 24, 2006)

It looks like a three team race between ATL, CHA and POR. All are young teams without a lot of veteran talent. It's impossible to say now, but look for injuries to be the key factor. Guys like Zach Randolph, Joel Przybilla, Emeka Okafor, Gerald Wallace, and Speedy Claxton need to stay healthy for their teams to stay out of the cellar, but inevitably one or more of those guys will get hurt, and their team(s) will tank. Depth is one of the often overlooked keys to not being the worst team in the league. My dark horse pick is Toronto. To me they look like they've improved this offseason. Even with losing the overrated Mike James and Villanueva, they added Ford and Rasho and balanced the roster out a bit, although I also wouldn't be that surprised if they struggle.


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## maxiep (May 7, 2003)

I hate to say it, but my expectation is that we, along with Charlotte and Atlanta, will be among the worst teams in the league this year and possibly the very worst.

PG - It will be between Blake and Jack. Blake is solid, but unspectacular and Jack is a question mark coming off of having his ankle cleaned up. Dickau sits in street clothes, Spanish Chocolate displays his wares in the NBDL and Roy gets a few minutes against the bigger PGs (Livingston, Jaric, etc.). I think without Bassy's explosiveness we'll be a bit worse than last year at the point.

SG - We're nothing but young or disgrutled. Roy looked great in LV, but the pros are another story. Martell still has a long ways to go, and probably will be pressed into playing the three. Dixon doesn't want to be here, doesn't practice hard and doesn't like coming off the bench. We'll need to move him before he becomes a distraction. Dickau might get some spot minutes, but he'll get abused on defense. We'll be a touch better here than last year.

SF - I don't expect Darius to play for us, which makes us worse talent wise in the short term, but clears the air and is better for us long term. Outlaw doesn't look like he's going to take that next step. I think Martell plays a lot of three this year, and it's going to be a learning process for him. We'll be markedly worse here than last year.

PF - Zach will continue to be Zach. I hope he has more confidence in his knee this year and his teammates can hit an open outside shot. If so he'll return to the post where he's so effective. I expect his scoring to stay the same, but his rebounding to increase to double digits. Raef, Skinner and Aldridge will all get their minutes here as well. This is the one position where I think we'll be much improved over last year.

C - I don't expect Joel to play more than 65 games this year. That being said, I still think he's a bargain at his contract. Raef will be a nice change up and will clear the post for Zach. Skinner is always rugged and reliable and I think when we play centers like Camby and Chandler, Aldridge will get some minutes. We'll be about the same if not a bit better than last year.

Coaching - I think Nate has so many new players he's going to keep tinkering with lineups. That killed us last year as no one stepped up, and will hurt us this year. It appears as if we have more "Nate Guys" on the team, and our rooks seem like the types who listen. I think he's a bit more effective this year, but not much.

I think we'll win between 18-24 games this year, and if we go injury free add six more onto the range. That being said, I like the future of this squad.


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## Ed O (Dec 30, 2002)

Ron Mexico said:


> but what if seattle got the #1 pick next year... another 1st round C?? or would they go elsewhere


Hmm... let me think about that one...

Ed O.


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## Minstrel (Dec 31, 2002)

Bottom five are likely to be Portland, Atlanta, Charlotte, New York and Toronto.

Unless Isaiah Thomas is a much better coach than I thought.


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## wastro (Dec 19, 2004)

I don't think Portland did anything to improve themselves in the short-term next season. They'll be back near the cellar, if not within a few games of it. In my endless optimism, I think this team can pull out 30-35 wins, but that's not factoring in injuries, which'll surely throw a wrench into the plans at some point.


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## dudleysghost (Mar 24, 2006)

Minstrel said:


> Bottom five are likely to be Portland, Atlanta, Charlotte, New York and Toronto.
> 
> Unless Isaiah Thomas is a much better coach than I thought.


Isaiah actually did seem like a decent coach in Indiana. I don't think he can work miracles with the Knicks roster, but just to improve the team a bit, he won't really have to. Larry Brown completely lost the team, and they weren't playing for him. Their roster is totally imbalanced, but it does have talent, and Isaiah is bound to get more wins just by being less hated by the players than Brown was.


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## soonerterp (Nov 13, 2005)

Atlanta
Charlotte
Golden State
New York
Orlando

are my bottom five, in no particular order except alphabetical.

For some reason I keep thinking that the Blazers will be next year's version of the New Orleans Hornets, only without the "horrible natural disaster necessitating relocation" factor. That is to say, they'll make a marked improvement and win more games but they'll still miss the postseason. There's also the Brandon ROY factor.


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## Verro (Jul 4, 2005)

Minstrel said:


> Bottom five are likely to be Portland, Atlanta, Charlotte, New York and Toronto.
> 
> Unless Isaiah Thomas is a much better coach than I thought.


I always got the impression LB was attempting to sabotage the team, based on his rotations/lineups/substitutions. Why he would do so other than to undermine Isaiah I have no idea, but it does lead me to believe the Knicks will be much improved this year if Isaiah is even competent as a coach.


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## Minstrel (Dec 31, 2002)

I don't think the Knicks underperformed last year, actually. When people say the Knicks "have talent," they really mean that the Knicks have offensive talent. If you look at their offense last year, it was near the top-ten (in terms of FG%, as PPG is affected by things like pace). 

The Knicks aren't at all talented on defense or rebounding (Francis is a good rebounder for his position and Marbury is a so-so defender...that's about it), and so far that doesn't figure to change. That's really what destroyed them last year, and I expect it to destroy them again this year even as they have another good offensive season.

The only way around it (other than some dramatic changes to the roster) is for Thomas to motivate players like Curry and Crawford to play defense and rebound as they never have before.

I don't think Thomas is a motivational genius, to prompt behaviour never seen before.


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## tobybennett (Jun 12, 2003)

Here's my diamond in the rough for worst team... Sacramento. They don't resign Wells, Artest gets suspended again, and the team loses a whole bunch of games. I could just pick Portland, but I'm trying to think of something else. I think Charlotte will have a really bad season. They have a decent starting line-up , but the bench is terrible.


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## blakeback (Jun 29, 2006)

Utherhimo said:


> i would say the spurs could be one of the worst teams
> 
> just like in 87 - david
> 97- ducan
> ...


Very interesting.


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## Waukee (Jul 14, 2006)

tobybennett said:


> Here's my diamond in the rough for worst team... Sacramento. They don't resign Wells, Artest gets suspended again, and the team loses a whole bunch of games. I could just pick Portland, but I'm trying to think of something else. I think Charlotte will have a really bad season. They have a decent starting line-up , but the bench is terrible.


 I think the Toronto Raptors will be really bad next year...The Kings have too many veterans to be the worst team in basketball.


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## gambitnut (Jan 4, 2003)

I've seen Orlando on two lists in this thread. Would one of the people who picked them like to tell me why?


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## soonerterp (Nov 13, 2005)

gambitnut said:


> I've seen Orlando on two lists in this thread. Would one of the people who picked them like to tell me why?


Dwight Howard is a good player, but methinks they might have drafted JJ Redick a little high. He already has a back problem that needs to be tended to ... remains to be seen if it becomes a lingering thing I guess.


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## gambitnut (Jan 4, 2003)

soonerterp said:


> Dwight Howard is a good player, but methinks they might have drafted JJ Redick a little high. He already has a back problem that needs to be tended to ... remains to be seen if it becomes a lingering thing I guess.


True, but they didn't have him last year and they weren't close to being a bottom five team. Will he drag them down that much? I think it is more likely that, if anything, he won't bring them up as much as they might hope.


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## Anonymous Gambler (May 29, 2006)

I have a hard time seeing Portland finish as the worst team with a healthy Randolph and the new additions. We seem to have a relatively solid lineup, if not an experienced one.

Let's break it down


PG- Jack/Blake two players with a decent offensive game, good field goal percentage, assists/turnover ratio, Jack at least is a quality defender

SG-- Roy/Dixon we will probably be starting a rookie, albeit a good rookie, he had a good all around game in college, summer league, though it remains to be seen what he does in nba. Dixon is awful defensively

SF- Miles/Webster- huge question mark- will Miles come to play/even be here?, can Webster learn to create his own shot, defend the 3?

PF- Zach/Aldridge/Skinner- very solid position, great offense and rebounding from Zach, poor to decent defense. Aldridge and Skinner may provide some defense.

C- Pryzbilla/Raef- a decent defense/offense combo here.


The way I see it, our two potential holes are at the 2 & 3, but we will be improved at almost every position over last years injury ridden season. The 1 will benefit from more experience. The 2 has a potential gem in Roy. The 4/5 have better back ups in Aldidge/Raef and have starters who are healthy- Zach especially. The 3 remains a huge question mark because of Miles/Webster, but overall it's hard not to see a big (at least a 5 game) improvement.

I think maybe we will be the 4 or 5th worst team.

So, who is the worst?

Maybe Seattle or Boston will be in the mix. I'm betting on Atlanta.


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## dudleysghost (Mar 24, 2006)

It seems possible that we will see more league parity next year than possibly any year in the past. Already, with 21 wins last year, the blazers were one of the best worst-teams in the last 20 years. With ATL, CHA and POR all potentially being healthier and adding players at important positions on their rosters, we could see the worst team in the league get a perhaps unprecedented 25 wins next year.


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## Ed O (Dec 30, 2002)

dudleysghost said:


> Already, with 21 wins last year, the blazers were one of the best worst-teams in the last 20 years.


Huh? Their margin of losses was staggering... they were one of the worst teams in years both in terms of record and in terms of ability to be competitive.

At -9.5, Portland lost by almost double digits on average. Their differential was almost 50% worse than the next-lowest (NY, at -6.4) and almost twice as bad as the third-worst (Atlanta, at -4.8).

Portland was in a tougher conference (they didn't get to play NY, Atlanta and Charlotte that often) but if we adjusted for pace (since Portland took the air out of the ball so often, reducing the number of possession) I would imagine it would be even worse. They were truly a terrible, terrible team.

Ed O.


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## dudleysghost (Mar 24, 2006)

Ed O said:


> Huh? Their margin of losses was staggering... they were one of the worst teams in years both in terms of record and in terms of ability to be competitive.
> 
> At -9.5, Portland lost by almost double digits on average. Their differential was almost 50% worse than the next-lowest (NY, at -6.4) and almost twice as bad as the third-worst (Atlanta, at -4.8).
> 
> ...


The part about conference is notable. The Blazers probably would have gotten a few extra wins playing against the bad teams at the bottom of the east more often, but that's not what I was referring to.

The Blazers were absolutely not one of the very worst teams in years in terms of record. In the last 20 years, the most wins the team with the worst record ever got was the 1986 Knicks with 23. After that, there were 4 teams with 21 wins, including the Blazers last year and two teams in 2002. In 16 out of those 20 seasons then, the worst team had a number of wins in the teens, and more often than not there were at least two teems with win totals in the teens. In terms of record then, the Blazers were one of the best worst-teams in recent history (and probably before that as well).

If anyone wants to point to point differential as evidence to the contrary, that raises some other issues, but I'll leave it to someone else to actually look up whether the Blazers -9.5 even actually makes them "one of the worst teams in years".


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## Dynasty Raider (Nov 15, 2002)

mediocre man said:


> ...Darius will lose his desire about a 1/3 of the way in and be a negative in the locker room...


I would hope that Darius matures with each year in the League. So, hopefully, he will acknowledge from talks on this bulletin boards and feedback from teams through his agent, that he NEEDS to change his image in order to keep from being stuck on rebuildng teams, and play up to his abilities. Hopefully, he will play to make himself marketable in order to get off the team next season. 

BUT, even if he does play up to his potential, will he alone change the fate of the 'Blazers?


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## dudleysghost (Mar 24, 2006)

Dynasty Raider said:


> I would hope that Darius matures with each year in the League. So, hopefully, he will acknowledge from talks on this bulletin boards and feedback from teams through his agent, that he NEEDS to change his image in order to keep from being stuck on rebuildng teams, and play up to his abilities. Hopefully, he will play to make himself marketable in order to get off the team next season.
> 
> BUT, even if he does play up to his potential, will he alone change the fate of the 'Blazers?


Darius's potential is huge. *IF* he played up to it, he would absolutely bring us a bunch more wins. He's "hell on sneakers" on both ends of the court when he's even moderately focused, but the problem is that those moments are fleeting, and the rest of the time he lacks focus and effort and just is a big shlub out there.


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## Ed O (Dec 30, 2002)

dudleysghost said:


> If anyone wants to point to point differential as evidence to the contrary, that raises some other issues, but I'll leave it to someone else to actually look up whether the Blazers -9.5 even actually makes them "one of the worst teams in years".


OK. From April 2nd (before the end of the season, but when Portland was sitting at or around -9.4):

http://www.basketballboards.net/forum/showpost.php?p=3367027&postcount=8

Ed O.


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## Fork (Jan 2, 2003)

Ed O said:


> OK. From April 2nd (before the end of the season, but when Portland was sitting at or around -9.4):
> 
> http://www.basketballboards.net/forum/showpost.php?p=3367027&postcount=8
> 
> Ed O.


Here's an interesting thing, to me at least...while we had that horriffic +/-, we had more wins than all but one of those other teams on that list. (We had 21 wins.)

2004-05: Atlanta, -9.7 (13 wins)
2002-03: Cleveland, -9.6 (17 wins)
2002-03: Denver, -8.3 (17 wins)
2001-02: Chicago, -8.5 (23 wins)
2000-01: Chicago, -9.1 (15 wins)
2000-01: Golden State, -9.0 (17 wins)

And there are more than a dozen teams in the last half dozen years that have had 21 or fewer wins in a season.

Three in 2005.
Three in 2003.
Two in 2002.
Three in 2001.
Three in 2000.

We were obviously horrible, but is point differential REALLY the best indicator? Personally, I think wins are. 'One of the worst in years' probably still qualifies, one of the worst teams EVER? I don't think that's the case.


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## Ed O (Dec 30, 2002)

Fork said:


> We were obviously horrible, but is point differential REALLY the best indicator? Personally, I think wins are. 'One of the worst in years' probably still qualifies, one of the worst teams EVER? I don't think that's the case.


I hear you, and it comes down to the importance once places on point differential... whether we were lucky to win as many games as we did or whether we were unlucky to lose by as much as we did (and almost never win in blowouts).

I tend to think that wins are less important than point differential in determining the "true capabilities" of a team. But I can see how others might disagree.

Ed O.


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## Minstrel (Dec 31, 2002)

Fork said:


> We were obviously horrible, but is point differential REALLY the best indicator? Personally, I think wins are.


I think point differential is a better measure of talent, as it removes the element of lucky point distribution.

If team A wins two games by 1 point each and loses two games by 20 points each, while team B wins two games by 5 points each and loses two games by 1 point each, are the two teams similar in ability since they're both 2-2?

Losing blowouts and winning close games can create a distorted effect of how good the team really is.


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## Masbee (Dec 31, 2002)

Ah, the old point differential debate.

Years ago I was really on the point differential bandwagon, thinking it an outstanding indicator of a team's level.

More recently, I have modified this view. I now think that point differential is a good way of comparing competitive teams - those in the large middle of the bell curve. 

Example; if you have two .500 ballclubs that you are looking at mid-season, and would like to take a guess which one will finish the year better - barring key injuries or trades - I like to look at point differential first, (then strength of schedule). If there is a large difference between the two team's point differentials, it is a good bet the one with the better differential will outpace the rest of the way.

On the other hand, I don't think point differential is nearly as useful with the very worst and the very best teams. To make a very very short summary of it: Blowout games are not like normal games. Behavior of all involved changes and skews the data - thus making it unreliable and not predictive.


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## dudleysghost (Mar 24, 2006)

Minstrel said:


> I think point differential is a better measure of talent, as it removes the element of lucky point distribution.
> 
> If team A wins two games by 1 point each and loses two games by 20 points each, while team B wins two games by 5 points each and loses two games by 1 point each, are the two teams similar in ability since they're both 2-2?
> 
> Losing blowouts and winning close games can create a distorted effect of how good the team really is.


The object of an NBA season isn't to maximize point differential, it's to maximize wins. You can say that a team winning significantly more than the point differential suggests must be due to lucky bounces, but that's pretty improbable with a large enough sample size, such as we see with 21 wins over an 82 games season.

Conceptually, think of this question: which points are more important in judging a teams skill level, a few extra points in a close game or a few extra points in a blowout? The former will be highly correlated with winning, and the latter will not, and both will be counted in point differential. Last season's Blazers always seemed to try hard in the close ones, but often gave up when the game seemed out of reach, leading to bigger blowouts. It doesn't speak well of the team that it was so willing to surrender and be humiliated in blowout games, but at the same time I think those large blowout game differentials are the ones that skew the point differential data away from accurately reflecting the team's ability to win, and that actual winning % is a better indicator of that in this case.


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## dudleysghost (Mar 24, 2006)

Masbee said:


> Ah, the old point differential debate.
> 
> Years ago I was really on the point differential bandwagon, thinking it an outstanding indicator of a team's level.
> 
> ...


That's the way I see it as well. Point differential is based on a larger sample size than winning %, since each bucket of every game counts, rather than just single game discrete outcomes, but due to the skewing effect of large point differential games, it's a pretty imperfect indicator. If we want to know how likely a team is to win a game, actual winning percentage becomes the best possible predictor once it's sample size is high enough to be considered statistically valid.


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## Minstrel (Dec 31, 2002)

Masbee said:


> On the other hand, I don't think point differential is nearly as useful with the very worst and the very best teams. To make a very very short summary of it: Blowout games are not like normal games. Behavior of all involved changes and skews the data - thus making it unreliable and not predictive.


What happens _after_ it's become a blowout may be unrepresentative, but the fact that it _became_ a blowout is very much tied to ability level. And that volatility after it becomes a blowout is likely fairly even...neither team plays its normal people or game once the contest is out of hand. It probably isn't a major distorting factor, in my opinion.


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## Minstrel (Dec 31, 2002)

dudleysghost said:


> The object of an NBA season isn't to maximize point differential, it's to maximize wins. You can say that a team winning significantly more than the point differential suggests must be due to lucky bounces, but that's pretty improbable with a large enough sample size, such as we see with 21 wins over an 82 games season.


It's not a matter of lucky bounces at all, it's a matter of luck as to how points are spread out. If you look team statistical production, it's often volatile...lots of points scored over certain stretches, long stretches of nothing much. That sort of volatility can lead to winning or losing a disproportionate number of close games (disproportionate to ability level).

That sort of statistical variance can very easily affect an entire season, because we're talking about the spreads of points and points allowed over the long-term. And it's likely that some teams are more prone to volatility than others.



> Conceptually, think of this question: which points are more important in judging a teams skill level, a few extra points in a close game or a few extra points in a blowout? The former will be highly correlated with winning, and the latter will not, and both will be counted in point differential.


That's precisely the point. A few extra points is worth, _in terms of ability level_, pretty much the same in any game. The idea is to score as many as you can and prevent as many points as you can. But circumstances can make scoring a few extra points yield very different results, despite it not speaking to greater ability: that's lucky.

I don't really buy the idea that point differential was skewed because the team "tried when it was close but checked out when it was out of reach." Most teams change their play greatly when the game is out of reach. The winning team often inserts substitutes and generally plays less intense basketball. I doubt this significantly affected the Blazers' point differential. It's not like the Blazers gave up when they were down 25 but the opposing team still kept playing their hardest, best game at that point.


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## dudleysghost (Mar 24, 2006)

Minstrel said:


> It's not a matter of lucky bounces at all, it's a matter of luck as to how points are spread out. If you look team statistical production, it's often volatile...lots of points scored over certain stretches, long stretches of nothing much. That sort of volatility can lead to winning or losing a disproportionate number of close games (disproportionate to ability level).
> 
> That sort of statistical variance can very easily affect an entire season, because we're talking about the spreads of points and points allowed over the long-term. And it's likely that some teams are more prone to volatility than others.
> 
> ...


Do you really think that the point differential of our second or third unit against another team's second or third unit is as representative of ability level as the differential during a close game when both team's are trying their hardest? I don't agree with that at all. Also, I don't see any real evidence to presume that the point differential observed after a game reaches blowout stage is near 0. If that was true, then differential becomes a much better indicator, but that's far from a given. In fact, my recollection of last season was that the team tended to get even worse during a blowout, which is how we even get to games with 30 or 40 point differentials.

But in any case, having an uneven distribution of differential (or as you called it; winning a disproportionate number of close games), doesn't at all show that the team was just lucky to get a few extra wins. Being able to win close games is one measure of a team's skill. Over a small sample size of close games, we can't make many conclusions from it, but over a season which probably has many close games, that becomes statistically relevant. I also disagree with the implied premise that volatility over the long season will tend to create a greater skew in the win %. The larger the sample size, and the longer the season, win % should regress toward the mean, not away from it.

If we were talking about comparing a 13 win team to a 9 win team, we'd have a higher likelihood for random variance accounting for the difference. But if we want to compare a 21 win team with 16 win teams, variance becomes a much less probable hypothesis.

One way to examine this issue statistically would be to chart the distribution of differentials for the whole season (and I'm sorry but I'm far too lazy and my stats software familiarity is too atrophied for me to actually do it). If Minstrel's model was correct, we'd see a fairly normal distribution about the mean at -9.5, albeit with a longer tail on the negative side, with a little blip in the curve about zero (although there's actually no 0 points, since there are no ties), with a dip on the minus side and a bump on the plus side. This wouldn't absolutely prove that luck rather than skill was to account for the disproportionate number of wins, but it would be consistent with that hypothesis.

I bet however, that the curve would lack an apparent single peak, and may in fact have a bimodal distribution with a small cluster centered about the 0 point and another slightly larger peak centered around -15 or so, indicating that the Blazers played one way when the game was close (up to their skill level, which is the original question) and much worse when the game was out of reach.


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## Ed O (Dec 30, 2002)

dudleysghost said:


> But in any case, having an uneven distribution of differential (or as you called it; winning a disproportionate number of close games), doesn't at all show that the team was just lucky to get a few extra wins. Being able to win close games is one measure of a team's skill.


This is probably wrong.

The ability to win close games is not something that is carried over from year to year, in the NBA or on major league baseball. Close games have too much luck and chance involved to be decided in a statistically significant fashion.

Expected wins (either using the pythagorean method, taking the points for and against to the 14th power (or 16.5th, as I've seen it elsewhere), or using a logarithmic approach) are accepted by almost anyone who studies the NBA from a qualititative perspective as a significant (if not 100% accurate) way of articulating a team's true capabilities.

Ed O.


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## Minstrel (Dec 31, 2002)

dudleysghost said:


> Do you really think that the point differential of our second or third unit against another team's second or third unit is as representative of ability level as the differential during a close game when both team's are trying their hardest? I don't agree with that at all.


No, I just don't think that it's likely to be a very large effect on the overall numbers. The vast majority of the data comes from the team playing at its true level and then you have some fringe data that A. isn't a large part of the data and B. probably largely evens out as both teams are taking it easier.



> Also, I don't see any real evidence to presume that the point differential observed after a game reaches blowout stage is near 0. If that was true, then differential becomes a much better indicator, but that's far from a given. In fact, my recollection of last season was that the team tended to get even worse during a blowout, which is how we even get to games with 30 or 40 point differentials.


The team didn't get "even worse." While the deficit grew a bit more, the amount that Portland was being outplayed actually shrank. If a team outscores you by 10 in the first quarter, 8 in the second, 5 in the third and 3 in the fourth quarter, you aren't playing "worse" even though the lead is growing. You're actually playing closer and closer to even.

This is the standard pattern of blowouts (not the hypothetical distribution I used above, but the team gradually playing closer and closer to even as the deficit grows) and it's what I recall from Blazers games. Of course, I didn't see them all.



> But in any case, having an uneven distribution of differential (or as you called it; winning a disproportionate number of close games), doesn't at all show that the team was just lucky to get a few extra wins. Being able to win close games is one measure of a team's skill.


Well, as Ed said, this is a dubious assertion. A "skill" needs to be repeatable to really be a skill. Overall, teams show no statistically significant ability to repeat "close win" proficiency from one season to the next.


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## dudleysghost (Mar 24, 2006)

Ed O said:


> This is probably wrong.
> 
> The ability to win close games is not something that is carried over from year to year, in the NBA or on major league baseball. Close games have too much luck and chance involved to be decided in a statistically significant fashion.
> 
> ...



Ed O, you seem like the kind of guy that finds sport in trying to prove someone else wrong. Whether what you say is actually true (although you linked nothing at all to demonstrate it, I don't completely doubt it), it's still only tangential to my point. Did the Blazers even win a disproportionate number of close games? Does the team have a fairly normal distribution of point differentials? Does "anyone (credible and expert) who studies the NBA from a qualitative perspective" even seriously suggest that point differential is a better indicator of the quality of a team than winning % _over a whole 82 games season for a team with 21 wins_? Those are the important questions. I think that the definition of team "skill" or "ability" is the ability to win games, and that an 82 game season is a good measure of that, because of the principle of regression toward the mean. 

And just for fun I counted up the number of games where the win or loss margin was 4 pts or less, and lo and behold, the Blazers were an even 9 and 9 in those games. If we assume Ed's implied assertion that close game wins/losses are fairly random is true, then we can positively conclude that the Blazers _did not_ win a disproportionate number of close games, which strongly supports the notion that the Blazers weren't tremendously lucky to win 21 games.


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## dudleysghost (Mar 24, 2006)

Minstrel said:


> No, I just don't think that it's likely to be a very large effect on the overall numbers. The vast majority of the data comes from the team playing at its true level and then you have some fringe data that A. isn't a large part of the data and B. probably largely evens out as both teams are taking it easier.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Ok Minstrel, let me ask you this: If the season could be replayed 1000 times, what kind of standard deviation would you expect to see for a team in the ~20 win range? 5 games? I doubt it, probably closer to 2-3. And knowing now that the team was 9-9 in games with a 4pt or less absolute differential is all the more reason to suspect that point differential is a less accurate predictor than actual winning percentage, rather than the other way around. It also strongly suggests that the 21 wins the Blazers showed last season (even discounting the fact that they played in a stronger conference than many of the EC "worst" teams of past years) put them above any 16 win team. It seems we won and lost all the close games we statistically should have won and lost.


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## Ed O (Dec 30, 2002)

dudleysghost said:


> And just for fun I counted up the number of games where the win or loss margin was 4 pts or less, and lo and behold, the Blazers were an even 9 and 9 in those games. If we assume Ed's implied assertion that close game wins/losses are fairly random is true, then we can positively conclude that the Blazers _did not_ win a disproportionate number of close games, which strongly supports the notion that the Blazers weren't tremendously lucky to win 21 games.


Actually, it shows that 21 wins is a bit of a fluke. They won 50% of "close" games, according to the numbers you cite, while only winning 18.75% (12 of 64) of the rest. Even that small sample is consistent with the position that close games are more lucky than true indicators of a team's capabilities.

And that, in turn, is a reason that point differential, and not wins, are more indicative of whether a team is good or bad.

As for me failing to cite a pretty well established body of evidence against teams being able to replicate the "ability" to win close games: sorry. Google.com works. Or you can believe me. Whichever.

Ed O.


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## dudleysghost (Mar 24, 2006)

Ed O said:


> Actually, it shows that 21 wins is a bit of a fluke. They won 50% of "close" games, according to the numbers you cite, while only winning 18.75% (12 of 64) of the rest. Even that small sample is consistent with the position that close games are more lucky than true indicators of a team's capabilities.
> 
> And that, in turn, is a reason that point differential, and not wins, are more indicative of whether a team is good or bad.
> 
> ...


I'm not sure I get what you are saying. Either you are citing the 50%/18.75% comparison to say that the Blazers _did_ win a disproportionate number of games (which would be evidence against your previous statement that luck determines close games), or you are just acknowleding that the fact that the Blazers _didn't_ win a disproportionate number of close games, which would in turn would be evidence against your following statement that point differential is a better indicator of wins than winning %. Which is it? My guess is that you are right about luck determining close games, and that since the Blazers were dead even in close games, the 21 wins is accurate, and point differential is found to be skewed.


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## MARIS61 (Apr 28, 2003)

How tragic and humiliating is it that this thread even exists on a Blazers board?

Managerial incompetence beyond belief.

Please, someone buy my Blazers and return them to their former magnificence.

Pretty please.


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## Ed O (Dec 30, 2002)

dudleysghost said:


> I'm not sure I get what you are saying. Either you are citing the 50%/18.75% comparison to say that the Blazers _did_ win a disproportionate number of games (which would be evidence against your previous statement that luck determines close games), or you are just acknowleding that the fact that the Blazers _didn't_ win a disproportionate number of close games, which would in turn would be evidence against your following statement that point differential is a better indicator of wins than winning %. Which is it?


Winning close games is not a skill. That's something that's been demonstrated to my satisfaction by a dearth of teams being able to replicate that over the span of more than a single season.

Given that it's not a skill to win close games, you would expect close games to either
(a) be won at a similar clip to the rest of the games of the season, or
(b) be won in a more or less random way.

Portland won non-close games at an 19% clip this year, but close ones at the rate of 50%. I would say that with that evidence, (b) seems to be controlling.

Given that close games tend to be more random in their results, and given that close games make up a significant percentage of NBA games (18 of 82, or 22% of the Blazers' games if your numbers are accurate), I reject that wins over the course of a season are conclusive evidence of a team's true capabilities... almost HALF of Portland's wins (9 of 21) came as the result of the "luck of the draw" that are close NBA basketball games. If they had won 19% of those games, they would have won 3 of 18, rather than 9. They'd be sitting at 15 wins on the season (actually 15.4 or so).

And their expected wins? According to basketball-reference it was 16. According to ESPN.com it was 13.

Ed O.


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## Minstrel (Dec 31, 2002)

dudleysghost said:


> Ok Minstrel, let me ask you this: If the season could be replayed 1000 times, what kind of standard deviation would you expect to see for a team in the ~20 win range? 5 games? I doubt it, probably closer to 2-3.


I have no idea. Any number I threw out would be based on nothing. What are you basing "5 games? I doubt it, probably closer to 2-3" on? I don't know, nor claim to know, how many wins this effect can be worth.



> And knowing now that the team was 9-9 in games with a 4pt or less absolute differential is all the more reason to suspect that point differential is a less accurate predictor than actual winning percentage, rather than the other way around.


Why? Fortuntae distribution of points doesn't just have to manifest as percentage of close games won. It can also manifest by creating a disproportionate numbers of close games, which throws more games than "should" be into the province of a coin flip.

As one of the worst teams in the league, is it to be expected that over a fifth of the games would come down to the wire? One way to approach that is to assume that games expectedly go down to the wire between teams of similar ability. Was Portland of a quality such that 22% of the league's teams were similar quality? That would be about 7 teams. No one in the West was of similar caliber to the Blazers (the next worst West team was the Wolves who finished 12 games higher), so were the Blazers of similar quality to the seven worst teams in the East, which goes up to Philadelphia? I'd say that nobody impartial would say so. At most, Portland was probably equivalent to the worst four Eastern teams (New York, Atlanta, Charlotte and Toronto).

Continuing with the back-of-the-napkin calculation, that means that Portland played more close games than they "should" have. To get a quick-and-dirty approximation of how many more games, we can divide 4 by 30 to get the actual percentage of the league Portland should have played close games with (13.333%) and then multiply that out by the 82 game schedule, which gives us approximately 11 (10.9333) games. But that assumes Portland plays equal amounts of games against everyone. However, all the teams they're comparable to play in the East, whom Portland plays only half as many games against. That drops the 11 to 5.5 games.

So, of the 18 games Portland played close, 5.5 of them should have been close, and the other 12.5 should have been as "normal." We can model this by multiplying the 5.5 by .500 (assuming close games are random) and the 12.5 by .188 (Portland's actual winning percentage with the 9-9 record in "close games" removed).

The result is 5 wins over those 18 games, instead of 9...a fairly sizeable 4 game swing. It would make Portland a 17-65 team. That would class them in with 16 win teams pretty solidly.

(I'm curious...if anyone knows the Pythagorean formula for basketball wins, what does that calculate for expected wins for Portland?)


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## dudleysghost (Mar 24, 2006)

MARIS61 said:


> How tragic and humiliating is it that this thread even exists on a Blazers board?
> 
> Managerial incompetence beyond belief.
> 
> ...


Allen just spent a ton of money so the Blazers could own the 2006 draft. I think we should keep him. I bet if you look at the history of the NBA, having a multibillionaire owner willing to spend more than the league average on payroll is highly correlated to winning %, in the same way that having some profit seeking investment group that keeps payroll between the league minimum and the salary cap on a consistent basis generally leads to more games lost.


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## Minstrel (Dec 31, 2002)

Ed O said:


> And their expected wins? According to basketball-reference it was 16. According to ESPN.com it was 13.


Does basketball-reference.com use Pythagorean wins and losses? If so, it's interesting that it correlates pretty closely to what I calculated in a quick attempt to account for how many close games Portland "should" have played.


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## Ed O (Dec 30, 2002)

Minstrel said:


> (I'm curious...if anyone knows the Pythagorean formula for basketball wins, what does that calculate for expected wins for Portland?)


^16.5: 13 wins (http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/stats/rpi)

^14: 16 wins (http://www.basketball-reference.com/teams/POR/2006.html)

Ed O.


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## Ed O (Dec 30, 2002)

Minstrel said:


> Does basketball-reference.com use Pythagorean wins and losses? If so, it's interesting that it correlates pretty closely to what I calculated in a quick attempt to account for how many close games Portland "should" have played.


I found that interesting, too. 

Ed O.


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## MARIS61 (Apr 28, 2003)

dudleysghost said:


> Allen just spent a ton of money so the Blazers could own the 2006 draft. I think we should keep him. I bet if you look at the history of the NBA, having a multibillionaire owner willing to spend more than the league average on payroll is highly correlated to winning %, in the same way that having some profit seeking investment group that keeps payroll between the league minimum and the salary cap on a consistent basis generally leads to more games lost.


I agree with that logic and we've both seen the proof of both sides.

I can't fathom what Allen has done over the last 3 years to completely undo all that good work and all those wins he paid for.

Funny thing on this board is posters continue to BLAME Whitsitt for spending Allen's money as ordered but continually PRAISE Allen for telling him to.

Funnier still is we are still spending it but getting much less talent for it than Bob got us.


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## dudleysghost (Mar 24, 2006)

MARIS61 said:


> I agree with that logic and we've both seen the proof of both sides.
> 
> I can't fathom what Allen has done over the last 3 years to completely undo all that good work and all those wins he paid for.
> 
> ...


I think Allen and Whitsit both deserve some blame and some praise. Whitsit built some great teams for us even given the salary levels he was allowed to use. That said, by the time he left the team was full of aging and/or overpaid players who had relatively little value going forward. Guys like Pippin, Sabonis and Dale Davis were so old by the time they left they were worth nothing in trade. Guys like Stoudemire, Anderson and Patterson were so overpaid, they were worth very little in trade. Guys like Sheed and Bonzi were talented, but had character issues that made them worth less in trade (although we possibly could have traded Sheed for more earlier). Beyond that, there were no good young player except Randolph for the team to build with. Allen was always willing to spend, up until recently, but he ultimately should hold a lot of blame just for hiring the guys like Whitsit and Patterson/Nash that eventually made the bad choices that wrecked the team. Even given that though, I'd be pretty happy if we ended up with a free-spending Allen as owner and an apparently smart guy like Pritchard as GM.


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## dudleysghost (Mar 24, 2006)

Ed O said:


> Winning close games is not a skill. That's something that's been demonstrated to my satisfaction by a dearth of teams being able to replicate that over the span of more than a single season.
> 
> Given that it's not a skill to win close games, you would expect close games to either
> (a) be won at a similar clip to the rest of the games of the season, or
> ...



It doesn't sound like you are even sure what you meant before by saying that skill isn't involved in winning close games. If skill isn't involved, of course it would be random and you should be able to reject a priori the hypothesis that close games wins would be in proportion to the rest of the teams. Of course half of those 9 wins were the "luck of the draw", as were half of the 9 losses in close games. Why do you not mention those? Why are you even multiplying 18 by 19% or 22%? It was helpful of you to point out the randomness of close games, but then you seem to reject it outright when it doesn't support your original hypothesis.


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## Tince (Jul 11, 2004)

MARIS61 said:


> Funnier still is we are still spending it but getting much less talent for it than Bob got us.



In the past 5 years player salaries have increased, yet our payroll is down from $105 million to roughly $65 million. 

So what exactly to you mean when you say we're still spending the money?


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## dudleysghost (Mar 24, 2006)

Minstrel said:


> I have no idea. Any number I threw out would be based on nothing. What are you basing "5 games? I doubt it, probably closer to 2-3" on? I don't know, nor claim to know, how many wins this effect can be worth.


The reason I mentioned standard deviation is because that's a commonly used measure of the variance we'd expect to see in a normally distributed data set. I picked "5" because I was just interested in the probability of seeing 21 wins when the talent level hypothetical indicates a mean more like 16 (which I had picked arbitrarily). The fact that now you guys are saying that 16 and 13 are numbers predicted by different methods using point differential as the independent variable is serendipity, so let's look at that.

Using a binomial distribution calculation, and the assumption that the team "should" win 16 games on average if the season were repeated a large number of times, we get an overall winning percentage of .195. From this value, we calculate a STD of 3.59. Assuming a normal distribution and non discrete units (it is discrete and it'll be a little skewed upward, but let's assume normality anyways), our 16 win caliber team would thus have a 69% chance of finishing the season with 16 +/- 3.59 wins. That means our chances of finishing with a value outside of that range (our two tailed p value) is less than 30%. Half of that is our one tailed p-value, which means there is less than a 15% chance of finishing with 19.6 wins or more. The team would also then have a 2.5% chance of finishing with more than 2 STDs above the expected (23.2). Extrapolating (roughly), that means a true 16 win caliber team has only about an 11% chance of winning 21 games. That means it's unlikely, but certainly not unlikely enough to reject that null hypothesis.

Using the same calculations with an expected 13 win team, we get a STD of 3.31, which means a 21 win team is about 2.7 STD's away. In other words, if the Blazers truly were a 13 win caliber team, it would take an pretty improbable season (around 1 in 100 chance) to exceed expectations by 8 games. Based on that evidence, we can confidently reject the null hypothesis, and conclude that that whatever model that came up with 13 wins as an expected is probably not an accurate one.

And that's the whole issue at hand here. You guys are saying that point differential, which does _correlate_ with winning, is able to predict expected winning percentage even better than actual past winning percentage, even when we have a large sample size of actual games won and lost to base that percentage on. Frankly, that's absurd. What I'm saying is that not only is that absurd, but I've spelled out for you a very concrete reason why you can't assume that point differential specifically during blowout games are as representative of a team's ability to win; namely that teams don't play the same way during blowouts. They are psychologically different, and they even use different player substitution patterns. There are other possible explanations as well, but if there are _any_ factors that skew the distribution from general normality, then you can't even say that point differential should be an accurate predictor. I've also shown you that the winning percentage we actually observed was pretty unlikely given at least one of the predictions made using point differential.

If those things aren't enough to convince you guys of the very intuitive and simple notion that winning % is the best indicator of a team's ability to win, then I'll just agree to disagree.



Minstrel said:


> Why? Fortuntae distribution of points doesn't just have to manifest as percentage of close games won. It can also manifest by creating a disproportionate numbers of close games, which throws more games than "should" be into the province of a coin flip.
> 
> As one of the worst teams in the league, is it to be expected that over a fifth of the games would come down to the wire? One way to approach that is to assume that games expectedly go down to the wire between teams of similar ability...


That assumption is simply not true. This model assumes a far far smaller degree of variance in scores than we actually observe in basketball, which is a terminal flaw. The fact that it even approximate one of the other projections using differential is almost sheer coincidence.


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## gambitnut (Jan 4, 2003)

I'll post more on this interesting topic in the morning, but for now I just want to throw in one set of stats I just calculated.

In games decided by four points or less, Toronto was 7-13, Charlotte was 6-11, Atlanta was 12-14 and New York was 10-13.

Not sure what all of that means, but the range is interesting.


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## Ghost (Jun 21, 2002)

I think it will be Portland or the Hawks


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## Iwatas (Aug 3, 2003)

All this math stuff is too complicated for me, but I wanted to share a statistic which shows how counterintuitive statistics can be:

Over 99.99% of the population have more than the average number of legs.

iWatas


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## Ed O (Dec 30, 2002)

dudleysghost said:


> It doesn't sound like you are even sure what you meant before by saying that skill isn't involved in winning close games.


What are you talking about? Your assertion that there is "skill" involved in winning close games is one of the first things I disagreed with on this thread.



> If skill isn't involved, of course it would be random and you should be able to reject a priori the hypothesis that close games wins would be in proportion to the rest of the teams. Of course half of those 9 wins were the "luck of the draw", as were half of the 9 losses in close games. Why do you not mention those? Why are you even multiplying 18 by 19% or 22%? It was helpful of you to point out the randomness of close games, but then you seem to reject it outright when it doesn't support your original hypothesis.


I don't understand what you're saying. I think that I was pretty clear in my most recent post and since you haven't taken the time to look up and understand expected wins, why close games aren't won by a special "close game winning skill", or seemingly the first thing about quantitative NBA analysis, I'm not going to spend more time trying to hold your hand. Sorry.

Ed O.


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## tlong (Jan 6, 2003)

Charlotte, Portland, and Atlanta will battle it out for the most ping pong balls in the 2007 NBA Draft.


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## Minstrel (Dec 31, 2002)

dudleysghost said:


> And that's the whole issue at hand here. You guys are saying that point differential, which does correlate with winning, is able to predict expected winning percentage even better than actual past winning percentage, even when we have a large sample size of actual games won and lost to base that percentage on. Frankly, that's absurd.


You allege that, but have done nothing to show that. There have been studies showing that run differential in baseball is a much better predictor of team quality going forward than winning percentage. That should be even more absurd to you, as baseball teams play approximately double the number of games and therefore have an even greater sample size at any given point in a season. Yet professional statisticians have done studies on this and shown it to be empirically true. And there have been no studies countering such findings, even though sabermetrics (the quantitative study of baseball) is a pretty competitive field, in terms of ideas.

I've heard of similar studies in basketball, though I haven't seen them myself.

There's no such thing as a universally valid sample size. Just because we're talking about a "season," doesn't mean that it's a representative enough sample that it renders statistical variance a non-issue. Teams can very often have "fortunate/unfortunate seasons," where one factor or another contributes to many more or less wins than they should have had. 



> That assumption is simply not true. This model assumes a far far smaller degree of variance in scores than we actually observe in basketball, which is a terminal flaw.


The whole idea of "expected wins" and similar concepts is to get at what the team _should_ be expected to do, based on "true talent," variance removed from the equation.

In reality, of course there will be variance but, if luck is neutral, that variance will cancel out. Portland will play some superior teams to close games but also lose some games to similar opponents by a lot. In other words, there will be positive and negative surprises that cancel out IF luck is neutral.

If variance ends up providing more close games than their talent should dictate, that's good luck. If variance ends up providing fewer close games than their talent should dictate, that's bad luck.

But expected wins _is_ assuming as little variance as possible. Variance distorts reality. We want to see what the team would have done without such a distortion, and I think my quick model accomplished that to some extent.


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## Pain5155 (May 28, 2006)

Blazers fans already adding Oden to there lineup next year, so i guess i have to say the blazers will be the worst team.


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## Fork (Jan 2, 2003)

tlong said:


> Charlotte, Portland, and Atlanta will battle it out for the most ping pong balls in the 2007 NBA Draft.


I'd throw Seattle onto that list as well.


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## tlong (Jan 6, 2003)

Fork said:


> I'd throw Seattle onto that list as well.


I wouldn't. Rashard Lewis and Ray Allen will be able to net a few more wins than those three teams.


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## dudleysghost (Mar 24, 2006)

Ed O said:


> What are you talking about? Your assertion that there is "skill" involved in winning close games is one of the first things I disagreed with on this thread.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Ed, you're the one who can't seem to decide whether the lack of a close game winning skill should result in a 22% or a 50% average winning rate in close games. You cited the fact that it is random (which should result in a near 50% average) when you wanted to find something I said was wrong, but then vascillated on the point when you found out that it didn't support your contention that the Blazers were lucky to win 21 games. You don't need to hold my hand, since I understand this just fine.


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## Fork (Jan 2, 2003)

tlong said:


> I wouldn't. Rashard Lewis and Ray Allen will be able to net a few more wins than those three teams.


They had Rashard Lewis and Ray Allen last year and got, what...26 wins? I bet they lose Wilcox too, so they're actually worse than they were last year.


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## jordanrowe31 (Jul 14, 2006)

new york
toronto
minesotta
portland
indiana
washington


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## Masbee (Dec 31, 2002)

Ed O said:


> Actually, it shows that 21 wins is a bit of a fluke. They won 50% of "close" games, according to the numbers you cite, while only winning 18.75% (12 of 64) of the rest. Even that small sample is consistent with the position that close games are more lucky than true indicators of a team's capabilities.
> 
> And that, in turn, is a reason that point differential, and not wins, are more indicative of whether a team is good or bad.
> 
> ...


What are you talking about?

You say that winning close games is not a skill.

Then you say that because the Blazers are a bad team (that presumably lacks the skill that better teams posses), that they SHOULD lose more of the close games.

WHY?

If there is no skill involved in close games, then why shouldn't the bad (aside from the historically terrible) teams win around half of them?

If there is some skill involved in winning close games, well, then that opens up the conversation.

Which is it?


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## Masbee (Dec 31, 2002)

gambitnut said:


> I'll post more on this interesting topic in the morning, but for now I just want to throw in one set of stats I just calculated.
> 
> In games decided by four points or less, Toronto was 7-13, Charlotte was 6-11, Atlanta was 12-14 and New York was 10-13.
> 
> Not sure what all of that means, but the range is interesting.


It means this:

Last season the 5 teams with the worst records compiled a record of 44 wins and 60 loses in games decided by 4 points or less. A winning percentage for the bad teams of 42.3%.

WELL above their overall winning percentage.

Yet, enough off the random 50/50 to indicate that there might be some amount of SKILL involved in winning close games. Or could be rather than some "skill" impact of better teams winning a bit more of these close games than the worst teams, that it is the worst teams that find some way of shooting themselves in the foot more often than better teams. (I kinda like that theory).

And, close enough to the Blazers 9 - 9 (42.3% of 18 games = 7.6 wins) to say they really were a 20 win team - and not some "pretender" worst team of all-time faking it with lucky wins that seldom happen to other bad teams.


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## Ed O (Dec 30, 2002)

Masbee said:


> What are you talking about?
> 
> You say that winning close games is not a skill.
> 
> ...


What question are you asking? I don't see any inconsistencies with my post, given there is no skill involved in winning close games, in particular.

Ed O.


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## dudleysghost (Mar 24, 2006)

Minstrel said:


> You allege that, but have done nothing to show that. There have been studies showing that run differential in baseball is a much better predictor of team quality going forward than winning percentage. That should be even more absurd to you, as baseball teams play approximately double the number of games and therefore have an even greater sample size at any given point in a season. Yet professional statisticians have done studies on this and shown it to be empirically true. And there have been no studies countering such findings, even though sabermetrics (the quantitative study of baseball) is a pretty competitive field, in terms of ideas.
> 
> I've heard of similar studies in basketball, though I haven't seen them myself.
> 
> There's no such thing as a universally valid sample size. Just because we're talking about a "season," doesn't mean that it's a representative enough sample that it renders statistical variance a non-issue. Teams can very often have "fortunate/unfortunate seasons," where one factor or another contributes to many more or less wins than they should have had.


Baseball is quite different from basketball. Look at the best and worst teams in baseball right now, Detroit at .674 and Pittsburgh at .344. Now look at the last year in the NBA, where Detroit was also best at .780, and Portland was worst at .256. I believe (without looking it up) that this is fairly typical of the spread we'd observe in an average season in either sport, and it's clear that a hypothetical team skill rank will correlate more with winning in basketball than in baseball. Part of that is probably due to the fact that teams trot out a different pitcher on different days, while basketball teams are more consistent. Most of that though is likely due to the luck factor being much larger in baseball, due to having comparitively low scoring games. If you have any links to someone who has worked on this issue as it relates to basketball (for which statistical analysis is also rapidly becoming more developed), I'd be interested to read it.

And regarding variance, I certainly didn't say it was a non-issue, and I was the only one who even bothered to calculate a standard deviation to quantify what kind of variance we should expect to see.




Minstrel said:


> The whole idea of "expected wins" and similar concepts is to get at what the team _should_ be expected to do, based on "true talent," variance removed from the equation.
> 
> In reality, of course there will be variance but, if luck is neutral, that variance will cancel out. Portland will play some superior teams to close games but also lose some games to similar opponents by a lot. In other words, there will be positive and negative surprises that cancel out IF luck is neutral.
> 
> ...


I'm sorry, but there are numerous flaws in this model. Foremost, the assumption that teams should play a number of close games equal to the % of teams of "similar caliber" is just not true. The most obvious reason, besides the fact that we arbitrarily decided what "close games" and "similar caliber" mean, is that for a team on either extreme end of the winning spectrum there are asymetrical opportunities for either positive or negative surprise. For Portland, being the worst team, if all but 22% of the league is supposedly "similar", then in 78% of games the team has a chance to make a positive surprise (by playing close in this case), while in only 22% of games is there are chance of reducing the close games number relative to the "expected". Why should we assume that these even out.

I'm certain that if you go an count the close games of the best and worst teams in the league, they will come out significantly higher than you expect with the "quick model". To start it off I counted Detroit's, and they had 14 games within 4 points, or 17% of their games, while only 2 other teams in the league (6.9%) were even within 9 games of the Pistons.

I think if we looked at other teams at the extreme ends of the winning spectrum throughout NBA history we'd find the same thing. This is one of the fundamental concepts in statistics. When real life consistently doesn't conform to the model, we don't just assume it to be an extreme case of variance, we conclude the model isn't accurate, in this case the "quick model." When we make that realization, we go back to our principles of statistics and then wonder which of our assumptions (stats is basically a process of assuming as much as you can justify getting away with) turned out to be wrong.

In the case of using point differential to predict wins, we apparently have two models, one that predicts 13 wins and one that predicts 16 wins. Since we actually observed 21 wins, so our null hypotheses of 16 and 13 have p-values of about .11 and .01. From that, we know that either the season we observed was a pretty fortunate one (or extremely fortunate one, if the 13 win model was correct), or there is some flaw in the statistical models.

Since those models do I believe assume a degree of normality (they were made for baseball, which I also assume but don't know for a fact has a fairly normal distribution of point differentials). The questions for us then are 1) do we see normal distributions in basketball point differentials? Although I don't have access to formatted data to plot it, my guess is no. Teams act differently in games that are blowouts, by putting in different players and using different strategies etc. That means teams on the frequent giving or receiving end of blowout games may have those differentials skewed by those games. Minstrel will probably say that variance tends to even things out, but that's just an assumption. Do we have any basis to conclude that the different way teams act in blowout games has no significant effect on differential? No, we don't. And while without looking at large sets of data, we can't conclude positively that there is an effect, we are still basing our assumption on an unknown.

Yet despite being based on unfounded assumptions, sometimes statistical models work anyways. If one finds that it conforms to a large representative sampling of data, you call it good. Has this been done for the pythagorean theorem as it relates to teams on the extreme ends of the winning spectrum? Not to my knowledge, and the fact that teams clearly behave differently in a blowout give us good cause to suspect it isn't going to work. What we do see for certain though is a sampling of 21 wins over the last season, and p-values that conclude that 16 win-caliber teams are unlikely to get 21 wins, and 13 win-caliber teams are very unlikely to do it.


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## dudleysghost (Mar 24, 2006)

Masbee said:


> It means this:
> 
> Last season the 5 teams with the worst records compiled a record of 44 wins and 60 loses in games decided by 4 points or less. A winning percentage for the bad teams of 42.3%.
> 
> ...


I don't know for a fact what's true at this point, but what Masbee is saying here sounds intuitively reasonable to me. If what Ed says is true about winning close games not being reproducible year to year, that means one of two things; either winning close games is not a skill, or there is so much luck and variance (game to game and year to year) that any skill would be washed out of significance in the data sets. For baseball, I suspect even if there was skill involved that luck would wash it out (although don't star closers have any significant effect?). For NBA basketball though, I think that if there were a skill at winning close games, it should be observable. If someone has actually looked at the data and found that not to be true, I'd be inclined to believe it.

But still, do the best teams not win many close games, and do the worst teams not lose them? If that were the case, we'd expect the winning % to fall on average somewhere in between the teams overall winning % (a rough estimate of the skill factor) and .500 (the luck factor), which Masbee's data seems to support.


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## ATLien (Jun 18, 2002)

How is Atlanta going to go from the 5th worst team in 2005 to the worst team in 2006, when they were the youngest team in NBA history in 2005? I don't see them making too large of a jump. I predict around 30 wins. But I can't see them losing more than they did a year ago.


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## Masbee (Dec 31, 2002)

Ed O said:


> What question are you asking? I don't see any inconsistencies with my post, given there is no skill involved in winning close games, in particular.
> 
> Ed O.


You are asserting two propositions that are in conflict with each other (as I see it):

1) There is no "skill" (that can be developed or acquired and is reproduceable) in winning close games.

2) The Blazers won more than their "fair" share of close games, because as a bad team they should have lost most of them.

I know lawyers like to argue every point that might plausibly support their case, as you never know which ones will be upheld, and which discarded, but in this instance, since we are not in trial, I want you to pick which point you are going with here.

I am going with No. 1.

If the Blazers were so bad as a team that they had very little chance of winning any games at all, yet managed to win 10 games total, and went 9 for 9 in Close games, I could see your point that they won more Close games than they "should" have.

Yet, bad (the typical bad around 20 win) teams winning over 40% of Close games seems to indicate otherwise.

I propose that 40% seems very reasonable, and I bet, consistent over the years.

Bad teams don't win a lot more than 40% of close games (or to put another way, don't make it all the way to 50% random would indicate) becasue they are bad. Duh.

Bad teams win 40%, double their overall win percentage, because when games are Close towards the end, better teams don't have enough time to overcome short spans of radom play and thus exert their advantage as a better team. Even bad teams can play well for 5 minutes. Even good teams can play poorly for 5 minutes. Basketball is a game of runs and even the good teams are part of that.


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## Minstrel (Dec 31, 2002)

dudleysghost said:


> I'm sorry, but there are numerous flaws in this model. Foremost, the assumption that teams should play a number of close games equal to the % of teams of "similar caliber" is just not true. The most obvious reason, besides the fact that we arbitrarily decided what "close games" and "similar caliber" mean, is that for a team on either extreme end of the winning spectrum there are asymetrical opportunities for either positive or negative surprise. For Portland, being the worst team, if all but 22% of the league is supposedly "similar", then in 78% of games the team has a chance to make a positive surprise (by playing close in this case), while in only 22% of games is there are chance of reducing the close games number relative to the "expected". Why should we assume that these even out.


Because worse teams are more likely to be inconsistent in a bad way. I'd say that while there are more _opportunities_ to make a "positive surprise," their chances of actually making good on one of those opportunities is lower than their chances of making good on a negative opportunity.

In other words, it's more likely that they'll have an unexpectedly bad game than that they'll have an unexpectedly good game.

Do you think it's more likely that Portland would unexpectedly lose by 7 to the Hawks (thereby not playing a "close game" with them) or unexpectedly win/lose by 1 against the Spurs? I think a poll of most fans would find that the Spurs surprise to be considered more unlikely. That's not conclusive, obviously, but I think it provides a good reason why these things should even out; essentially it's a product of two amounts:

(opportunities to positively/negatively surprise)*(chance of fulfilling that opportunity)

The first amount is unequal, but so is the second, I'd argue.



> Teams act differently in games that are blowouts, by putting in different players and using different strategies etc. That means teams on the frequent giving or receiving end of blowout games may have those differentials skewed by those games. Minstrel will probably say that variance tends to even things out, but that's just an assumption.


That's not all I'm saying. I'm also saying that blowout data (the minutes played _after_ the blowout has been established as totally out of reach) is also a very small part of the overall data and therefore doesn't affect the totals much.

A team down 20 in the first or second quarter doesn't change its style of play or its substitutions much. So you can't count most of that time. It's more like down 20+ sometimes in the fourth quarter tends to cause significant changes. The minutes played after that point are pretty minimal compared to all the minutes played for a team throughout the year.



> What we do see for certain though is a sampling of 21 wins over the last season, and p-values that conclude that 16 win-caliber teams are unlikely to get 21 wins, and 13 win-caliber teams are very unlikely to do it.


Anecdotal evidence isn't very compelling. All seasons will have some teams that underperform and overperform bya surprising margin. Formulae like the Pythogorean win-loss formula undergo plenty of regression tests to see how it conforms to the actual data. As far as I know (based on actually seeing the studies in baseball and hearing about them in basketball), these types of formulae tend to fit the data quite well overall.


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## Fork (Jan 2, 2003)

Here's something else.

Our point differential was very high, but we suffered an extraordinary number of blowouts. We lost 9 games by 29 or more points. To compare, the Chicago Bulls of 2000-2001 lost just 2 games by 29 or more, yet only won 15 games all season in a pretty weak Eastern conference. (And they only had 2 more losses in the high twenties...we had a few more.) 

I'm not convinced that that indicates that were an all time bad team last year. Arguably the most inconsistant? I might agree with that. But that's the nature of a VERY young team with almost no veterans who understand how to keep games from going from blowout to 'superblowout.' But the bottom line is, a loss is still a loss. I don't see how point differential makes any difference.


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## Ed O (Dec 30, 2002)

Masbee said:


> You are asserting two propositions that are in conflict with each other (as I see it):
> 
> 1) There is no "skill" (that can be developed or acquired and is reproduceable) in winning close games.
> 
> 2) The Blazers won more than their "fair" share of close games, because as a bad team they should have lost most of them.


I'm not asserting #2. Except insofar as teams involved with more close games have their win totals distorted by close games because of #1.

Close games tend to result in more wins for bad teams than is a "real" indicator of the team's capabilities.

As such, the close game randomness artificially pushes extreme teams (both very good and very bad) towards the middle, which makes wins less indicative of how good or bad a team is than point differential.

Ed O.


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## Ed O (Dec 30, 2002)

Minstrel said:


> Anecdotal evidence isn't very compelling. All seasons will have some teams that underperform and overperform bya surprising margin. Formulae like the Pythogorean win-loss formula undergo plenty of regression tests to see how it conforms to the actual data. As far as I know (based on actually seeing the studies in baseball and hearing about them in basketball), these types of formulae tend to fit the data quite well overall.


I think that this is pretty important. Minstrel and I aren't just making this up. Expected wins is a stat that has been studied pretty thoroughly.

Does it mean that it's perfect? Of course not.

Does it mean that it makes more sense and has stronger underpinnings that a simple thought experiment on a normally distributed season? Absolutely.

Ed O.


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## Masbee (Dec 31, 2002)

Ed O said:


> I'm not asserting #2. Except insofar as teams involved with more close games have their win totals distorted by close games because of #1.
> 
> Close games tend to result in more wins for bad teams than is a "real" indicator of the team's capabilities.
> 
> ...


That's fine. Yet, you have insinuated that the Blazers are different than other bad teams IMO.



> Actually, it shows that 21 wins is a bit of a fluke. They won 50% of "close" games, according to the numbers you cite, while only winning 18.75% (12 of 64) of the rest. Even that small sample is consistent with the position that close games are more lucky than true indicators of a team's capabilities.
> 
> And that, in turn, is a reason that point differential, and not wins, are more indicative of whether a team is good or bad.


As if 21 wins measly wins, and last place, isn't by itself enough evidence or proof to signify to the world that the Blazers sucked, you need to ram home a point I continue to fail to see established - to wit - the Blazers sucked so bad that their last place finish was deceptively outstanding! And, in a way that was unique to the Blazers, not just as applies to most bad teams.

And yet, I show that 50% is not that far off from the norm of last season.



> Huh? Their margin of losses was staggering... they were one of the worst teams in years both in terms of record and in terms of ability to be competitive.
> 
> At -9.5, Portland lost by almost double digits on average. Their differential was almost 50% worse than the next-lowest (NY, at -6.4) and almost twice as bad as the third-worst (Atlanta, at -4.8).


Thus, my confusion.


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## Minstrel (Dec 31, 2002)

Masbee said:


> As if 21 wins measly wins, and last place, isn't by itself enough evidence or proof to signify to the world that the Blazers sucked, you need to ram home a point I continue to fail to see established - to wit - the Blazers sucked so bad that their last place finish was deceptively outstanding! And, in a way that was unique to the Blazers, not just as applies to most bad teams.
> 
> And yet, I show that 50% is not that far off from the norm of last season.


Close games should be around 50%. Games that go down to the wire turn on periods of time too small for talent superiority to assert itself in any meaningful way. Who plays better over a 30 or 60 second spurt is pretty random.

I think Ed's point (and, for sure, mine) has been that the Blazers played in a lot of close games, which gives them a disproportionate number of games in which they played .500 ball as opposed to their normal winning percentage. I think that provides a slightly deceptive win total, as they had a surprisingly high number of coin flip games.

Obviously, people may disagree over whether they had a surprising amount of close games. I think they did, which is why I think point differential says more about the "true talent" of last year's team than winning percentage.


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## Masbee (Dec 31, 2002)

Minstrel said:


> Close games should be around 50%. Games that go down to the wire turn on periods of time too small for talent superiority to assert itself in any meaningful way. Who plays better over a 30 or 60 second spurt is pretty random.


Is there an echo in here? Seems we agree on this point.



Masbee said:


> Bad teams win 40%, double their overall win percentage, because when games are Close towards the end, better teams don't have enough time to overcome short spans of radom play and thus exert their advantage as a better team.





Minstrel said:


> I think Ed's point (and, for sure, mine) has been that the Blazers played in a lot of close games, which gives them a disproportionate number of games in which they played .500 ball as opposed to their normal winning percentage. I think that provides a slightly deceptive win total, as they had a surprisingly high number of coin flip games.
> 
> Obviously, people may disagree over whether they had a surprising amount of close games. I think they did, which is why I think point differential says more about the "true talent" of last year's team than winning percentage.



Wait - now you are arguing that the Blazers were involved in more than normal number of close games - and that is why they won 21 games even though point differential says they should have won fewer?

I don't agree with that conclusion.

First thought: I ask myself, were the Blazers "lucky" to be in more than a normal number of close games, or did they earn the right to be in those close games with decent play (every few games)? I say they earned it. Just as they earned their blowout losses.

Second though: Were they involved in a surprising number of close games. Last season, bad teams involved in close games:

Toronto - 20
Charlotte - 17
Atlanta - 26
New York - 23
Portland - 18

Still think Portland was involved in a surprising number of close games?


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## Minstrel (Dec 31, 2002)

Masbee said:


> Is there an echo in here? Seems we agree on this point.


I was agreeing with you on this.



> Wait - now you are arguing that the Blazers were involved in more than normal number of close games - and that is why they won 21 games even though point differential says they should have won fewer?


Now? I spent a hideously long post earlier in this thread doing a rough calculation of how many close games Portland "should" have played and then seeing how much playing more close games affected their record.



> First thought: I ask myself, were the Blazers "lucky" to be in more than a normal number of close games, or did they earn the right to be in those close games with decent play (every few games)? I say they earned it. Just as they earned their blowout losses.


How do you determine what is earned and what is lucky? Or do you feel luck never enters into how a team does in a season?

I think that there are ways of determining a rough approximation of expected results for a given talent level and then determining deviation from that, which would be luck...good or bad.

Not necessarily my way, above. That was back-of-the-napkin stuff, nothing statistically rigorous.



> Second though: Were they involved in a surprising number of close games. Last season, bad teams involved in close games:
> 
> Toronto - 20
> Charlotte - 17
> ...


I think that my calulations are probably off, but yes, I still think Portland played more close games than should be expected. The other four teams mentioned are all Eastern teams, who play in a notably weaker conference and play each other twice as often as Portland plays them.

It stands to reason that they should all play significantly more close games than Portland, yet Portland played more than one, nearly as many as another and only Atlanta played many more close games.


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## Ed O (Dec 30, 2002)

For the record (I know that everyone really cares about the record here): I'm taking no position on the number of close games the Blazers were in. I'm saying that when measuring true capabilities of a team, point differential is a better indicator than wins, because in close games wins are something closer to a coin flip, so the number of wins gets distorted irrespective of the quality of the team (save, I suppose, for teams that are mediocre, since they tend to win about 50% of their games, anyways).

Ed O.


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## Fork (Jan 2, 2003)

Minstrel said:


> I think that my calulations are probably off, but yes, I still think Portland played more close games than should be expected.


As I posted earlier, I believe Portland actually played a disproportionate number of blowouts, rather than a disproportionately large number of close games.


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## Fork (Jan 2, 2003)

Ed O said:


> For the record (I know that everyone really cares about the record here): I'm taking no position on the number of close games the Blazers were in. I'm saying that when measuring true capabilities of a team, point differential is a better indicator than wins, because in close games wins are something closer to a coin flip, so the number of wins gets distorted irrespective of the quality of the team (save, I suppose, for teams that are mediocre, since they tend to win about 50% of their games, anyways).
> 
> Ed O.


I think you're wrong.

As I posted earlier, Portland lost 9 HUGE blowouts. Portland sucks, to be sure...but 9 huge blowouts of 29 or more points, changes the point differential by a TON without really showing any indication of a team's true talent level. Those 9 losses create a 3.5-4 point differential by themselves over the course of 82 games. A lack of veretan leadership explains huge blowouts, in my opinion. Veterans know how to keep a game close, even if they don't have the talent surrounding them to get a win. But that doesn't mean the team is any less talented.

If point differential were the true indicator of a team's skill level, wouldn't that be how they determine the NBA championship?


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## Ed O (Dec 30, 2002)

Fork said:


> As I posted earlier, Portland lost 9 HUGE blowouts. Portland sucks, to be sure...but 9 huge blowouts of 29 or more points, changes the point differential by a TON without really showing any indication of a team's true talent level. Those 9 losses create a 4 point differential by themselves over the course of 82 games.


The fact that the Blazers got destroyed so regularly IS an indicator of their sorry talent level. I don't see how you can write off the point differential just because they got the crap kicked out of them.



> A lack of veretan leadership explains huge blowouts, in my opinion. Veterans know how to keep a game close, even if they don't have the talent surrounding them to get a win. But that doesn't mean the team is any less talented.


This has nothing to do with anything we're talking about, IMO. 



> If point differential were the true indicator of a team's skill level, wouldn't that be how they determine the NBA championship?


Not at all. Winning the championship is its own goal. Determining the best team with statistical confidence is another matter entirely.

Ed O.


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## barfo (Jan 2, 2003)

Fork said:


> If point differential were the true indicator of a team's skill level, wouldn't that be how they determine the NBA championship?


Maybe it should be. That would make every game important, and eliminate the coasting that starts anytime a team gets up by 10 points.

I like it. 

barfo


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## zagsfan20 (Dec 24, 2004)

You guys can pull out all your different formula's and scenario's for why we were the worst team overall or not last year...But who cares last season was last season and in my eyes if you aren't a playoff team it doesn't really matter how much better you were than the worst overall team..


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## maxiep (May 7, 2003)

zagsfan20 said:


> You guys can pull out all your different formula's and scenario's for why we were the worst team overall or not last year...But who cares last season was last season and in my eyes if you aren't a playoff team it doesn't really matter how much better you were than the worst overall team..


No offense, but that's just silly. There's a world of difference between being a Portland, Atlanta, NY or Charlotte and playing out the string and being a borderline playoff team that just misses, where every game at the end of a season is an elimination game.


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## tlong (Jan 6, 2003)

Interesting that there are so many posts debating the level of "*suckiness*" the Blazers achieved last season...


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## dudleysghost (Mar 24, 2006)

Ed O said:


> I think that this is pretty important. Minstrel and I aren't just making this up. Expected wins is a stat that has been studied pretty thoroughly.
> 
> Does it mean that it's perfect? Of course not.
> 
> ...


A simple thought experiment? I'm talking about the fundamentals of statistics. The concepts of sample size, expected variance and doublechecking that your data conforms to your assumptions (like normality) are Stats 101 stuff, and I don't think they should be dismissed so cavalierly. There are a couple hundred years of "underpinnings" for those concepts..

Contrast that with an "expect wins" formula designed and tested for baseball (which you guys curiously never mentioned before...). Doesn't the "expected wins" formula assume near normality? And doesn't the existence of 9 blowout losses of 20 pts less than the mean (and only 1 game 20pts above the mean) at least make you guys suspect that we didn't have normality? The application of a formula designed for a sport with different parameters (much lower scores mainly) on a team that clearly doesn't conform to the assumptions of said formula to be more of a "thought experiment" than the basic use of the most rudimentary fundamentals of statistics.

That's my statement for the record ... and I'm spent.


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## Ed O (Dec 30, 2002)

dudleysghost said:


> A simple thought experiment? I'm talking about the fundamentals of statistics. The concepts of sample size, expected variance and doublechecking that your data conforms to your assumptions (like normality) are Stats 101 stuff, and I don't think they should be dismissed so cavalierly. There are a couple hundred years of "underpinnings" for those concepts..


And you think that you know them better than Minstrel does, or the guys who study basketball statistics for a living (Hollinger, Oliver, et al)... why?

Ed O.


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## yakbladder (Sep 13, 2003)

I don't think the formulas so much are in question as the underpinning assumptions made about components of the formula.

You are trying to write a formula to describe characteristics of a unique group of "atoms" and their interactions with each other and other groups. However, as Dudleysghost has pointed out, your sample size is abysmally small. You can't really make a prediction based upon the various factors that play into the interaction component and expect it to have some effect because the stability of the interactions and the composition of the atoms was spotty at best. Psychology of players, I would add, is immeasurable, and cannot be fully analyzed because you don't know what is occuring outside of the workplace.

Furthermore, your variance isn't firmly accounted for, or at the least quantified. It's like leaving an open-ended statement. 

I'd argue that any formulas attributed to basketball and the pevalence of one team to win or lose and by how much and as a general indicator of talent level is about as useful as a bookie in Las Vegas or an Internet poster with a general feel for the team.


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## dudleysghost (Mar 24, 2006)

Ed O said:


> And you think that you know them better than Minstrel does, or the guys who study basketball statistics for a living (Hollinger, Oliver, et al)... why?
> 
> Ed O.


I'm fairly confident in what I wrote because it's a fairly rudimentary application of statistics principles, like I said. As for knowing better than Minstrel, I believe I do, because he didn't seem to understand the flaws in his assumptions for his "quick model", which indicates an degree of unfamiliarity with the subject on his part.

As for the rest of argument from authority: Are you certain that Hollinger, Oliver or any other expert has actually said that point differential is a better predictor of winning probability than actual winning after 80 games, specifically including the instance of a team that has experienced numerous blowout games? An argument from authority isn't really a valid logical tool if the authority doesn't say what he/she is alleged to have said. If they have commented on the topic, I would be curious to see how they addressed the issue of an abnormal distribution. But I haven't seen anything like that. In fact, the only serious discussion of using the pythagorean theorem to calculate expected winning % from point differential I've seen is in _baseball_, which as I addressed previously, has important differences from basketball.


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## Ed O (Dec 30, 2002)

dudleysghost said:


> In fact, the only serious discussion of using the pythagorean theorem to calculate expected winning % from point differential I've seen is in _baseball_, which as I addressed previously, has important differences from basketball.


*sigh*

Again: the Web exists. There are things that allow you to search it.

And just because you haven't seen it doesn't mean it doesn't exist, and your attitude coming from ignorance is a bit confusing.

To ask whether expected wins take blowouts into account, or whether they're more accurate at predicting success than a single season's worth of wins and losses... that's just a strange pair of questions. Why would a model be used so exhaustively if it didn't account for blowouts or if it was no better than the standings of a single year?

Ed O.


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## Minstrel (Dec 31, 2002)

dudleysghost said:


> As for knowing better than Minstrel, I believe I do, because he didn't seem to understand the flaws in his assumptions for his "quick model", which indicates an degree of unfamiliarity with the subject on his part.


Personally, I think you're confused about statistical terms. You seem to know what they mean, but you misapply them. Your inability to understand that "expected wins" is seeking to separate true talent level from variance and that variance from expected wins represents luck is surprising.


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## Fork (Jan 2, 2003)

Ed O said:


> The fact that the Blazers got destroyed so regularly IS an indicator of their sorry talent level. I don't see how you can write off the point differential just because they got the crap kicked out of them.
> 
> Ed O.


To ultra simplify it....

If you lose 82 games by exactly 10 points each time...or, if you lose 81 games by 1 point each time and the final game by 739 points...your point differential is equally bad.

But in my opinion, the team that ALMOST won 81 games is a LOT better than the team that got beaten by double figures in each game.

(And you say that that 'is an indicator of sorry talent level,' as if I was disagreeing with the assertion that Portland sucks. I agree, it takes a pretty terrible team to lose by an average of 9+ points per game on average...but I still contend that that statistic is inflated because of a few huge blowouts which are NOT indicative of talent level.) 

Both teams suck obviously, but it seems to me that you're giving point differential, rather than wins, a greater 'value' in determining 'crappyness.' Why should point differential be the more important factor, when WINS are what determines who makes the playoffs and who wins a championship?


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## e_blazer1 (Feb 3, 2004)

"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics." 
_Benjamin Disraeli & borrowed by Mark Twain_


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## dudleysghost (Mar 24, 2006)

Ed O said:


> *sigh*
> 
> Again: the Web exists. There are things that allow you to search it.
> 
> ...


Just an FYI, it's customary in both academia and on message boards for the person who claims to have read something somewhere to reference it, rather than to just make a claim that some research exists and challenge anyone else to find it if they want to dispute it. This is done for at least two reasons; 1) To discourage people from making claims from imaginary sources or by carelessly misquoting or misinterpreting their sources. 2) To save anyone who wants to examine those sources (to see if they are even correct or just to learn more) the time of beginning a new research project, since it's usually much simpler for someone who is making a claim based on a source they are familiar with to actually cite that source then it is for another person to search the universe for it with little specific information on what he or she is supposed to be looking for.

You see, google.com and other search engines actually contain quite a bit of information, even on a topic as specific as the statistics of basketball. If you know of a specific source that backs up the specific claims you've made in this thread Ed, why not cite or link them? If you don't remember where you read something, it's not such a bad thing to admit. Personally, I think you are remembering what you read incorrectly, and that the sources you've encountered do not in fact support the contention that in basketball the expected wins formula is better than actual win record at guaging a team's ability to win games, especially when point differentials have a non-normal distribution. However, despite your protestations about having to do my research for me, I'm at a terminal impasse, because I can't prove a negative. I can't prove that something doesn't exist. However Ed, you can prove yourself to be correct simply by referencing the sources that specifically confirm what you have been saying.

And I don't mean any source that broadly discusses the concept of pythagorean calculations of expected winning, I mean a source that specifically addresses the issue of whether the expected win calculation is more predictive than actual winning % in _basketball_ (not baseball), and if a non-normal point distribution should be consired problematic for said formula. If you can't cite a source, then you can't credibly make an argument from authority.


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## ScottVdub (Jul 9, 2002)

Sacramento with a new coaching staff might completely fall off if chemistry doesnt work, that will be my surprise sucky team of 2007. I hope the Knicks are the worst team because i freakin' love it. It's like sunshine on a rainy day for me when the city of new york has an overpriced bucket of a sports team.


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## Charlotte_______ (May 18, 2003)

tobybennett said:


> Here's my diamond in the rough for worst team... Sacramento. They don't resign Wells, Artest gets suspended again, and the team loses a whole bunch of games. I could just pick Portland, but I'm trying to think of something else. I think Charlotte will have a really bad season. They have a decent starting line-up , but the bench is terrible.


We've had a bad bench since our first season.


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## dudleysghost (Mar 24, 2006)

Charlotte_______ said:


> We've had a bad bench since our first season.


That's exactly why I picked Charlotte to stay near the bottom. So often people just look at the starting lineup to evaluate a team, and with Felton/Knight, Wallace, Morrison, Okafor and Primoz/May, that's a pretty good young top 7, but who is behind them? A few very cheap players. Charlotte would be ok if all of those top 7 guys stayed healthy, but last year they definitely didn't, and on any team at least a couple injuries should be expected. It seems clear that the Bobcats are content to lose a lot of games still this year (to get in the Oden sweepstakes perhaps), because they are not taking the steps to climb out of the gutter. Just spending even close to the salary cap, by signing a few cheap backup veterans, would probably take them off the bottom of the standings, but ownership isn't doing it. They are even talking about trading Brevin Knight, so it seems they are content to lose now, and get another great draft pick or two to build for the distant future with.


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