Archive for March, 2011

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2010-11 NBA power rankings through the games played on March 3, 2011:

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While I'm en route to Boston for the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, here's a neat question SI's Zach Lowe had regarding the Memphis Grizzlies' defense:

"Memphis has emerged as a top-10 defensive team despite being good at only one of the four factors--forcing turnovers, which they do extremely well. They rank below the league average in eFG (barely below the avg), DRB rate (horrible) and FT/FGA (somewhere in between). I have a feeling it's unusual for a team to rank in the top-10 overall while ranking below the league average in 3 of the 4 defensive factors, but perhaps it's not as unusual as I think it might be."

It is very unusual, in fact. Since 1974, the first year we can compute the Factors, just eleven defenses (including Memphis) have ranked in the top 10 despite being below-average in 3 of 4 Factors. And if we expand it to include either offense or defense, the list contains only 27 teams:

I'll let Zach provide the commentary, so go check out his post at SI's Point Forward blog.

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In the wake of the ongoing Charlie Sheen chaos, I was (of course) racking my brain to find a comparable NBA analogy. Ideally you'd want to find a situation with the following parallels:

• It involves a winning team. Although I have personally never seen an episode, Sheen's show Two and a Half Men is apparently wildly successful, as Sheen is quick to point out to anyone who will listen. So any NBA equivalent would have to involve a good team, probably one that had been a contender for multiple years.
• It involves that team's best player. Monetarily speaking, Sheen is the #1 scorer on Two and a Half Men, and in fact the league's top player -- he made $1.8 million/episode in 2010, making him the highest-paid actor on television. The basketball equivalent would have to deal with a similar star in his prime.
• The team releases that player mid-season. Production on Two and a Half Men's 8th season was halted midway due to Sheen's behavioral problems, so an NBA version would have to involve a team waiving their best player in the middle of the season.

Unfortunately, there isn't a single situation in NBA history that meets all of those requirements. In fact, as far as I can tell, there are only a few remotely comparable situations:

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If you're a long-time reader of this blog, you know that Ken Pomeroy's Kenpom.com is one of my favorite college basketball websites (just a notch below CBB @ Sports-Reference, of course). So it's great to see that Ken will once again be using his ratings to generate win probabilities for each conference tournament (and the NCAA tourney) over the next few weeks. You can find all of those posts at the Basketball Prospectus Unfiltered Blog, but to start you off, here are the odds for some of the early tournaments:

Let log5 season begin (Big South and Horizon)

Log5: A-Sun, OVC, and Patriot