The results are in for the 2011 Internet Basketball Awards - you can read Kevin Pelton's summary of the voting here.

Sorry about the lack of posts recently; I've been busy working on the new Stathead Blog. Don't worry, though -- I will have playoff previews and other posts forthcoming, once we find out the matchups for Round 2. And in the meantime, here's a funny video parodying those incessant Clyde Frazier-Keith Hernandez (and now, inexplicably, Randy Johnson) Just For Men commercials. (Note: PG-13 for language.)

Sports Reference's New Blog: Stathead

I have to admit that I find it very hard to follow all of the great research that people people are producing every day on the web. It's hard enough just checking the two or three largest sites, but when you add in team blogs, other stathead blogs and everything else, it becomes impossible. This doesn't even include trying to locate recent research in hockey, baseball, football and soccer.

So we've decided to do something about it. Every weekday, the Stathead blog will summarize the best research-related studies, news, conferences, and resources for baseball, basketball, football, hockey and soccer.

The blog will primarily be edited by Neil Paine and will typically feature 20-30 links to analytic content around the internet. We've been working out the format over the last two weeks, and we think you'll soon appreciate our concise summaries for all of the articles we write about.

Feedback as always is welcome.

A roundup of this week's links:

April 22, 2011

• Revisiting tempo-rature in Milwaukee - Brewhoop’s Alex Boeder looks at the relationship between pace factor and the Milwaukee Bucks’ chances of winning. Link

• Thoughts on Pacers, Heat and Mavs - Wayne Winston gives the +/- and impact ratings from recent games. Link

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College Crunch has its picks for the 10 Best Opening-Round Series in NBA Playoff History.

What happens if you create power rankings using Jeremias Engelmann's 4-year Regularized Plus-Minus ratings (the most predictive version of APM) and each playoff team's distribution of minutes through two games?

Take a look:

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ESPN had an interesting news story today about Danny Crawford's history with the Dallas Mavericks in the playoffs:

NBA playoffs 2011: Referee Danny Crawford assigned to Game 2 of Dallas Mavericks-Portland Trail Blazers series - ESPN Dallas

The gist is this:

"The Mavs have a 2-16 record in playoff games officiated by Crawford, including 16 losses in the last 17 games. Dallas is 48-41 in the rest of their playoff games during the ownership tenure of Mark Cuban, who has been fined millions of dollars in the last 11 years for publicly complaining about officiating."

At the risk of running afoul of the Wyatt Earp Effect again, what is the probability that this has happened due to chance alone?

In his book Mathletics, Wayne Winston finds that the final margin of victory  in an NBA game can be approximated by a normal random variable with a mean of the point spread and a standard deviation of 12. Using that knowledge and the handy chart ESPN provided at the bottom of their story on Crawford, we can calculate the probability of Dallas winning each of their Crawford-officiated games since 2001:

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In case you haven't already seen it, NBA.com just launched a sweet stat tool called StatsCube:

StatsCube - Advanced basketball statistics for NBA players and teams on NBA.com

John Schuhmann had been using it in his columns for a while, but now the public can sift through the data for themselves.

On April 29, 2011, Google Video is shutting down. While hockey fans will lament the loss of these full-length games (some of which are also available on Hulu), this doesn't mean a lot to the NBA fan -- after all, games like this can also be found on YouTube, and who really wants to see grainy footage of a 2005 Celtics-Sixers game?

However, Google Videos also housed a number of old Charlie Rose interviews with basketball players and writers (Rose, from North Carolina, is a big fan of the game). Here are some that you should watch while you still can:

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It was a banner weekend for underdogs, as the away teams kicked off the 2011 Playoffs with 3 wins, including victories by the Western Conference #8 and #7 seeds. How do the road teams' performances in this set of opening-round game 1s compare to other years since the playoffs expanded in 1984?

Let's take a look (all numbers from the perspective of the average road team in Game 1 of the 1st round):

(Click column headers to sort by each category.)

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