Prompted by some questions in the comments of Monday's post about the playoff predictivity of regular-season W-L vs. elite teams, here's some more raw data on every 2nd-round or later series since the merger:

Read the rest of this entry »

How in the cosmos did I miss this the first time around?

Two weeks ago, while I was busy with Super Bowl/Hall of Fame work at PFR, SBNation's Tom Ziller posted a story -- and an awesome graphic -- about the biggest "black holes" (players who never pass) in the NBA.

Read the rest of this entry »

From Hoopism, makers of the dunk contest video library and various other neat NBA visualizations, comes an extremely cool Valentine's Day gift for b-ball aficionados:

NBA’s Greatest Shots – Court Location & Video

Despite their high overall marks, apparently neither the Lakers nor the Heat can beat the league's other so-called "elite" teams. Miami is just 6-9 this season against teams in the top 10 in W-L%, and 0-6 against top-5 teams. The Lakers are barely better, going 6-7 vs. top-10 squads and 2-6 against the top 5. Here's a summary of the other teams in the top 10 by either W-L% or point differential:

Read the rest of this entry »

Alex Sonty, who writes ChicagoNow's Load O' Bull blog, has been paying close attention to Henry Abbott's TrueHoop posts about Derrick Rose -- specifically, this post about past MVP winners and their teams' rankings in wins. Henry found that team wins were highly correlated with MVP voting, to the point that 19 of the last 20 MVPs came from a team with a top-3 record. This of course is bad news for Rose, as the Bulls are 6th in winning % at the moment.

But Alex was wondering how past winners stack up in a schedule-adjusted margin-of-victory based metric like the Simple Rating System, where the Bulls are 5th. So here's the master list -- every MVP winner, with their team's rank in both WPct and SRS:

Read the rest of this entry »

2010-11 NBA power rankings through the games played on February 10, 2011:

Read the rest of this entry »

From way downtown...BANG!

Keeping Score: The Story Arc of the 3-Point Shot

Read all about it in Friday's print edition too.

Ken Pomeroy (of the outstanding college hoops stat site Kenpom.com) ran an interesting simulation last month with regard to the randomness inherent in single-game plus-minus scores:

A treatise on plus/minus - the kenpom.com blog

According to Ken's simulation, a player with precisely average "true +/- skill" can show up with wildly variant observed +/- values over the course of a game, or even 20 games.

Just for fun, I re-ran this experiment for ten thousand games, tracking the observed +/- impact of the player through various checkpoints. Here were the results:

Even after 10,000 games, a massive sample that would never be possible to achieve in real life, our perfectly average "player" appears to be a half-point per 40 min worse than average by raw on/off-court plus minus. As Ken says, "respect randomness"!

Just as we did last season, let's take a look at which players would have made the All-Star teams if various advanced stats were the only criteria in the voting. To pick teams, I used the official positional designations from the 2011 ballot; each team must have 4 guards, 4 forwards, and 2 centers, with room for 2 wild cards from any position to fill out the roster. Players in bold are starters; "*" designates the player as a member of the real-life All-Star team.

Read the rest of this entry »

Today I would like to introduce a new feature that I think will be a lot of fun: the NBA Elo Player Rater.

The Elo rating system is a method for calculating the relative skill levels of players in two-player games. The creator of the system, Arpad Elo, was a professor of physics at Marquette University who wanted an improved chess rating system. Although the system has its roots in chess, today it is used in many other games.

Read the rest of this entry »