AROUND THE 2024 NBA PLAYOFFS: 2nd ROUND, MIN vs DEN, OKC vs DAL, BOS vs CLE, IND vs NY

Seeding and home court advantage are bullshit. They don't matter in the playoffs. The regular season in the NBA is like one giant pre-season. And the "play in" bullshit made it even more so.

 

The Wolves when the championship, then all of a sudden everyone's going to be like "small ball is out" you need to have two big men...

 

Gordon 4pts
Porter 7pts

T-Wolves defense slammed the door shut

 

don't forget Reid & SlowMo, the Timberwolves keep the big men flowing

 

The data would disagree

 

two unique big men, OK. How many bigs in the league shoot over 40% on three's like Kat does? and Reid?

 

Edwards is 5th in PER in the playoffs ahead of SGA.

PER is ok, but it isn't end all be all. Edwards is 22 and the best player on a team in the western conference finals. His best days are ahead of him and he will be Top 5 soon enough.

 

Size Matters!

 

I think the data is almost purely an artifact of the better teams getting more home court games and the fact that the regular season does pre-sort the quality of teams to some degree. But when you have two teams who are close in terms of talent, you seem them win on each others courts all the time. Travel and motivation isn't a factor in the playoffs.

 

I never bought into the idea that big men were no longer important. It seems some think everyone should copy the GS model of playing a Draymond Green type at center.

The Blazers had success with Nurkic/Kanter, even though some thought you "can't play Kanter" because he wasn't fleet-a-foot on the perimeter.

 

I'm not sure what you're saying. Yes, teams win on the road, we agree there.

Disagree that homecourt advantage makes little to no difference. Again, there is data to show that teams are more likely to win on their home court than on the road.

 

The home team wins 60% of the games in the playoffs. But the question, is what is the true causation. Example: if you had a 1st seed team and a 8th seed team square off in a 7 game series, and they play at a neutral location, but they call games 1-2 "home" for the 1st seed team, games 3-4" home for the 8th seed etc, you'd get a home court advantage correlation just because of the fact that the better team is playing more games at home.

More home games are likely to have been played by the better team.

 

Where did you get this data? How long was the sample size?

I heard yesterday that 75% of Game 7 winners are the home team. That doesn't really go in line with your argument that the superior team is just naturally going to win more because the series got to a game 7, therefore they were someowhat evenly matched, though the home team wins 3 out of ever 4 times.

Vegas certainly thinks home court is a real advantage in the playoff games given how much the spread changes when the venue moves.

 

Except Boston the past two years.

 

Sure... there are always exceptions to the rule in sports. The exceptions don't disprove the trends though.

 

Home winning percentage is not hard to find or calculate. All time it's about 62%, but has been falling. Someone did a study of the nba playoffs since 2013 in particular, and it was 60% for the home team.
https://www.nba.com/news/nba-home-court-win-percentage-this-season-will-be-worst-ever

And in the playoffs, a portion of this is going to be due to the fact that more home games are played by higher ranked teams.

The idea that at least some portion of that percentage is due to that affect is a statistical certainty. Playing 82 games in order to have 1 game were you have such a slight advantage is silly. The better team is going to win anyway. If it were a 1 in done series it would seem more substantial.

 

NCAA Tournament. If you called the higher seeded teams "home", and the lower seeded teams "visitors", you'd get a really strong home court winning percentage, even though the games are played in neutral territory. The same affect holds true, to a lesser degree in the playoffs of professional sports.

 

Ex-Blazers left in the playoffs:
MAVS:
Derrick Jones Jr. (How the fuck has he become a genuinely useful player? I guess playing with point guards who can throw lobs helps)
Greg Brown III (How the fuck is he on their playoff roster?)
Brandon Williams (are they signing ALL our scrubs? It's not going to make me root for them)

MINNY:
Luka Garza (Blazers' SL legend!)

CELTICS:
Jrue Holiday (YOU'RE WELCOME, BOSTON)

PACERS:
Not even a scrub - boo! BUT they have former GM Kevin Pritchard, and former assistant coach Rick Carlisle...

 

Disagree with Marang. That was a stupid question.
I also think the answer was pretty foolish as well.