Archive for the 'SRS' Category

Well, this past week's games haven't exactly gone according to the numbers, have they? In both of this year's conference finals, we're headed for some pretty serious upsets, at least if you believed the Simple Rating System -- in the East, the Orlando Magic (SRS: 6.49) are really wearing out the Cleveland Cavaliers (8.68), and while the Denver Nuggets (3.13)-vs.-L.A. Lakers (7.11) West finals are technically tied, you can't help but see the Nuggets as the more dominant team in the series right now.

Read the rest of this entry »

I probably don't need to tell you this, but I'm going to anyway: the Los Angeles Lakers are torching the NBA right now. They're currently 12-1, they rank 3rd in the league in offensive efficiency with an ORtg of 111.4, and they have the NBA's best defense (96.5 DRtg) -- better even than the Boston Celtics, whose stifling D was one of the major reasons the Lakers lost in the NBA Finals this past June. With Pau Gasol and Andrew Bynum in the fold full-time this season, we knew they'd be a formidable team, but I think it's safe to say they've exceeded even their most optimistic expectations going into the season.

Read the rest of this entry »

That's right, it's all expectations all the time here. To refresh everyone's memories, on Friday we looked at a very simple way to set up preseason expectations for each team using a linear regression model with the previous season's SRS. Then, yesterday we took that same dataset and added team minute-weighted age as a variable, which helped to (marginally) improve the model's fit.

Read the rest of this entry »

On Friday, in an effort to establish preseason "expectations" for each team, we built a very simple model for projecting future performance at the team level. We included both W-L records and SRS scores from the 5 previous seasons in a linear regression, and we discovered that in both cases the only past season that's significant at the 5% level is the year directly before the one we're trying to predict (year "Y-1"). We also found that past SRS scores (which are essentially average scoring margins, but adjusted for strength of schedule) better predict future W-L than past W-L do -- which just confirms what people like John Hollinger have been saying for a long time. Finally, using our regression model, we ranked the biggest positive ('08 Celtics) and negative ('99 Bulls) surprises in NBA history, and showed what the model predicted for the current season as well.

Read the rest of this entry »

The 2008-09 NBA season is finally getting started, and just about every fan and media member is concerned with what we can expect from each team. So here's a question: from a strictly statistical perspective, which teams in NBA history most exceeded their preseason expectations? By the same token, which teams were the most disappointing in light of their expectations?

Read the rest of this entry »