The Blazers haven't washed out their dismal performance against the Lakers in the opener. The idea is that it's supposed to get it right at of the end of the season. I just like updating it every day for the horse race aspect. I purposely don't include strength of schedule, like Hollinger, because the average NBA schedule ends up being about the same strength by the end of the season. I also don't subjectively alter it to move a team like the Blazers up, who are lagging behind where you would expect them to be because of their record as a result of one horrible game, because throughout the course of the season, all teams are expeced to have some horrible blowout losses. The playoff aspect is minor, only 10% of what goes into a team's Dabullz Rating. The purpose for this is a team is more likely to win the championship, as it is a gradual series of steps to getting towards championship level play for the most part. This only is trouble in years with massive player movement (see Kidd to Mavs, Garnett/Allen to Celtics, Shaq to Suns, etc. that drastically shift the landscape of the NBA). I think for the most part, they will do a good job at predicting the champion in most years, it's not perfect, but you can never make these things perfect.
You rank teams by their current rating, right? I think it would also be interesting to see how the rankings change if you rank them by their current rating's percentage of their max rating.
I'm working on the power rankings portion of my site. Once I get this disappearing page text problem on my site resolved, I will post 3 versions. The main (which you see now), without recent playoffs, and percentage of max.
I got the early page for my power rankings up on my site now: http://dabullz.com/power-rankings/ It'd be great if one of the person with great graphix ability made me a new banner. (760x200).
this of course means that teams in the east will be rated higher than they should be since western conference teams played a tougher schedule than eastern conference teams(as they have to play the other teams in the west more). assuming that the west ends up with the better record in nonconference games, of course. if not it would be the other way around.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding. If the goal is to predict record for the end of the season, strength of schedule has to be a factor. A team that's playing poorly against a weak schedule is more likely to continue to play poorly the rest of the way than a team that's playing poorly against a very difficult schedule.
All NBA teams have roughly the same strength of schedule throughout the entirety of the NBA season, so there really is no reason to include strength of schedule.
Yes it is true, every team has to play 41 home games and 41 away games, which includes every single team in the nba. Of course depending which conference you're in, you'll play some teams more.
and right there you just agreed that teams don't play equal strengths of schedule. they play the same number of home and away games. last season the western conference teams went 648-582. meaning that eastern conference teams went 582-648. since western conference teams only play eastern conference teams twice while playing western conference teams 3 or 4 times, clearly the strength of schedule there is not almost equal. leaving out strength of schedule also doesn't take into account when a team has played a tough(or weak) schedule so far. this obviously is a problem that disappears once there are no games remaining on the schedule, but takes away meaning from the rankings before reaching that point.
They'll have roughly the same schedule at the end of the season. But you're trying to rank teams mid-season. A team that plays only scrub teams and goes 7-3 is probably not better than another team that plays only contenders and goes 6-4. But if you ignore strength of schedule, you might not recognize that.
I'd venture to say that Eastern conference teams (at least in the past) had a much easier schedule than any Western conference team, because they'd get to play weaker teams more frequently than the Western teams would. I realize that everyone plays everyone in the end...but when I'd rather play Eastern conference teams 3 or 4 times a year than Western conference teams 3 or 4 times a year.
Plus those stronger Western conference teams also have to go through each other to get to the finals.
This is quite true. The East has a lot of surprises this year too. I never expected the Bulls to be playing .500 ball, or for the Cavs or Hawks to have one of the better records in the East. However...I think this will eventual even out and we'll eventually see mediocrity sink in, like it always does in the East.
