This is our old blog. It hasn't been active since 2011. Please see the link above for our current blog or click the logo above to see all of the great data and content on this site.
"The New York Knicks did everything in their statistical power to beat the Denver Nuggets on Tuesday night.
They made more field goals. They made more 3-pointers. They had more rebounds. They had more assists. They had fewer turnovers. And they had more blocked shots.
The Elias Sports Bureau told us that the last 266 times a team outperformed its opponent in all of those statistical categories, that team won the game.
Except the Knicks didn't win. They lost again, 120-118, their sixth straight defeat, this one starting a tough West Coast road trip. "
Of course, raw stats can deceive. Looking at our boxscore, we see that while New York did control the turnover battle and the boards, they were also beaten somewhat handily in eFG% and FT/FGA. That's bad, because eFG% in particular is far and away the most important of the Four Factors, the key statistical indicators of team success.
When Tom Thibodeau left his job as Doc Rivers' defensive guru in Boston, many speculated that Chicago would become dominant defensively and the Celtics would lose some of their defensive luster.
We're few weeks into the season, though, and as CelticsBlog's Jack Jemsek notes, Boston's D isn't really any worse for ware while the Bulls haven't improved very much at that end. What gives, Thibs?
"In '92, after the first championship (with the Bulls), I think we're 46-3 or 43-6, something like that around the All-Star break," Jackson recalled. "The owner called me up and said, 'I hope you're not trying to win the most games ever won in one season.'
"And I said, 'Well, we have a lot of depth. We have a young team. I'm not trying to wear them out. We're just trying to use momentum and win games.'
"That team ended up winning 67 games. They had a little letdown at the end of the season. You get a feel like teams know how to win games and know how to turn it on at the end. They know how to expend the right amount of energy to win a ballgame.
"That really happened with the team in '95-96. They knew how to blow teams out and put them away in the early part of the second period. Everything kind of fell into place for us, also.
"We went on a long road trip and three of the five teams or eight teams we played on that road trip had injuries to players who were important players. We won seven out of eight games on that road trip. Things like that happened."
Few teams in NBA history have had that ability. Right now, the Lakers and Heat are in that group, with SRS scores north of the 1971 Bucks' all-time record (remember, that team was arguably the most dominant ever). However, I doubt either will keep up that blistering pace over 82 games -- and like Jackson said, this may be a good thing. You'd much rather your team be at the top of this list than dominate the regular-season and not have any hardware to show for it.
As a follow-up to my review of Draft Day Sports: Pro Basketball 2, Wolverine Studios president Gary Gorski has generously offered to give one lucky BBR reader a free copy of his game. And since he asked that I come up with a contest for the giveaway, I thought this would be a great chance to revisit our old friends at Sporcle...
A significant part of DDS:PB2 is devoted to testing your skills as an executive, so I want you to name every NBA team's current General Manager in under 4 minutes. You can re-take the quiz as many times as you want, but starting the moment this post goes live at 11:00 AM EST , the first person to email me a screenshot of their form with all of the answers correct, within the allotted time, wins the game.
To which I say... Finally! I've been waiting for someone to use that methodology on the sport that popularized the plus/minus stat in the first place. Even though the standard errors are huge (especially for goalies, whose impacts are difficult to disentangle from teammates because they rarely leave the ice), it's still encouraging to see the effort be made.
Crazy amounts of backstory here. It all starts with a largely forgettable NBA Jam ripoff called Barkley Shut Up and Jam, released for Sega Genesis, SNES, & Atari Jaguar in 1994:
A neat article here from 48 Minutes of Hell, looking at how well the preseason predicts the regular season... As it turns out, the games going on right now aren't quite as meaningless as we like to believe.
Recently I had a chance to answer some Eastern Conference-related questions for Eddy Rivera of MagicBasketball.net, a longtime friend of the BBR Blog. In the interview, we chatted about not just the Magic, but also the Heat and the Celtics. Check it out!
I always like to make sure you guys are on the cutting edge of NBA analysis, which not only means providing our own statgeekery here at the BBR Blog, but also linking to any and all external sources of APBRmetric knowledge... That's why I feel it's my duty to urge you to check out Pro Basketball Prospectus 2010-11, available for digitial download at BBPro's site now (and hard copy next week).
Kevin Pelton and Bradford Doolittle always do great work at the Prospectus website, and their annuals carry that tradition over into book form. Five years after John Hollinger wrote his last hard-copy version of the Pro Basketball Forecast, the PBP series is the only annual I'd pick to fill that void in my bookshelf. It's also the only book that I literally carry with me to NBA games -- seriously, ask Justin, he can confirm that I do this. PBP contains tons of advanced stats, scouting reports, skill ratings, and tendencies for every projected NBA regular, making it an invaluable resource to me as I'm watching games.
Simply put, if you love detailed, sophisticated NBA analysis, and you want a companion book for the 2011 season, you owe it to yourself to pick up a copy.
