Hollingers power rankings has us 4th

Well, he just started doing this in 2007. So, it's definitely still a work in progress. Good for him for trying, but there is often more to winning and losing than can be calculated with a formula.

BNM

 

Wait, are you trying to convince yourself that the Blazers have peaked?

 

Right...lets just ignore the travel too...So how many regular season games a year does his old Euro team play? Im not saying he isnt good...just that he will hit a wall at some point this year.

 

#4 sounds about right to me. Hopefully we'll improve on that.

 

Then I guess he should be on the Lakers, you guys don't appear to travel.


You seem to really be trying to convince yourself that the Blazer team is as good as it will get. Take out Raef and we're the youngest team in the league, with three Rookies playing important roles. I mean, you even wrote that since Joel is playing well, it's the same as Oden dominating right now... It's hard to take you very seriously at that point.

 

Look, I know you dont like me for some reason so you always try to take my views to the extreme so allow me to elaborate.

Yes they are firing on all cylinders for THIS YEAR (or close to it). Undefeated at home and impressive road victories for one of the youngest teams in the league. One cylinder (Joel) might be replaced by another (Oden) but can you really expect Oden to vastly exceed THIS YEAR what Joel has done so far THIS YEAR??? Even Ed O pointed out the players that are exceeding anything they have done before in the NBA. I swear to god, it seems normal rookie tendencies apply to all rookies except if they play for the Blazers (sarcasm). ROOKIES HIT WALLS. You guys beat ORL, NO, and DET in your first month...its gonna be hard for you team to do that all year. You guys can easily have a better monthly record than your NOV record but it will probably be against an easier stretch of games.

 

Exactly

 

Joel is currently averaging 6.2 points, 7.9 rebounds, and 1.4 blocks.

Oden is averaging 8.1 points, 7.7 rebounds, and 1.7 blocks already, in less minutes, and I really can't see how that wouldn't increase substantially as he gets into game shape and gains experience. So to answer your question, yes.

 

I agree. OTOH, at .667 they don't have to play much better, I'd be happy win "only" 55 wins (.667*82).

 

Well, duh. We don't play them each month!

 

You asked for historical data. Hollinger also relies on events that happened many years in the past for curve fitting his play-off predictor equation. Why is his historocal data valid and mine is not?

Do we know that? How far back does he go. Is what happened 32 years ago statistically relevant to what will happen this year? If he did include it, it's just a single data point, and most likely a statistical outlier.

Or maybe, just maybe, his formula is oversimplistic. And maybe that's why he's constantly revising it. It's not really a "formula", it's simple curve fitting - coming up with an equation that best fits the data. The data changes and he changes his equation.

It would be interesting to create a formula that included play-off experience and past play-off success. I don't have time to do it, but I think it would be a very interesting. Historically, (76-77 Blazers aside), inexperienced teams have not faired very well in the post season. It took the Bulls several years to get past the Celtics and Pistons. You have to go all the way back to the late 1970s to find a "young" team without significant play-off experience that won it all. Once teams figure out how to win in the post season, they are very hard top beat - the Bulls two three-peats, the Lakers three-peat, the Rockets winning back-to-back, the Spurs winning 4 times in 9 years, the Celtics and Lakers pretty much owning the 80s, etc.

Hollinger's equation is fun, but really just how accurate is it. Go back and look at it at any point in the season and see just how closely what he predicts actually happens. At the end of January 2008, he had Indiana with a 66.0% chance of making the play-offs and Philadelphia at 13.8%. Guess who made the play-offs. Of course, the further the season progresses, the more accurate his "predictions" become, but that can be said of almost any system (including simply looking at the current standings).

BNM