An amusing diversion for the mid-morning: saw this for the first time last night, and a Facebook friend shared it today to remind me of it. As an added Oregon-specific bonus, the clip was produced by hotshot ad agency Weiden + Kennedy. Working stiffs--human and otherwise--should be able to relate...
In order to estimate the likelihood of a win in any given game, I used John Hollinger's Power Rankings for NBA teams, and divided the competition into four tiers of difficulty: Elite (30% chance of a win in any one game); Peer (50% chance); Lesser (60% chance); and Chum (80% chance). The tiers and figures are all eyeballed, based loosely on the idea that a team with a .700 winning percentage would be 70% likely to win any one game. Cleveland, Boston and LA are over .800 right now, but when you include Orlando, Denver, and Utah the average gets closer to .700. (And a month later we'd likely swap San Antonio for Utah, but the principle would remain the same).
Obviously a "peer" team is one generally equivalent, and that fairly well describes most of the other West teams Portland is competing with. Then there's a group of teams who aren't quite on that level but remain dangerous--we'll call them the Unpredictables, and given Portland's .600+ record so far, I apply the reverse of the elites calculation, giving the other teams 40% win chance against the Blazers. The "chum" represent the bottom half, against whom--by reputation and also good Blazer efficiency against such teams in the past--one can expect a win 4 out of 5 times.
So, a month later, are the Blazers still on track?
A man with some interest in sports and numbers, and an Excel sheet, can be a dangerous thing. (Luckily I'm a trained professional.*) A popular parlor game among the Blazer faithful of late has been to look ahead at the rest of the season, and predict a level of wins that might be expected or realistically hoped for, as well as what the chances are that Portland makes the playoffs for the first time in what seems like forever.
Most striking to me so far has been Gavin at 95.5 on the most recent Blazer podcast, going the other way from Casey and BEdge Dave on whether the Blazers would make the final 8 in the West. I think barring injury and some complete meltdown, the chances are very strong--like, 75%--to see Portland at least somewhere among the eight.
But just guessing really isn't much fun, or at least my guesses aren't worth anything if they're just guesses. So I set about predicting wins the rest of the way based on some kind of rational analaysis. The short answer is that I look for the Blazers to win 29-30 more games of their final 47, to finish with at least 50...but not much more unless they really exceed expectations, either by total efficiency against the bottom dwellers or parity with the big boys.
I used the Hollinger Power Rankings, a fairly stable and reasonably well-fed sample of data this far into the season. I noted the order and rating of each team, and also their record against Portland so far, as well as how many games the Blazers had remaining against them. Based on those two factors, I assigned an expected win percentage in four broad tiers among the 29 other teams, and then applied that to the Blazers' remaining games. The results displaced in my shoddy but endearing graphical way, below. {Step back into the 20th century below the fold!}
I confess to being rather a stats geek, whether it's election statistics or fire/EMS or basic demography or sabermetrics. As much as I love football as a sport, it's a big downer that so few games means a small sample and much more variability in football stats. And other than Rachel Maddow and of course Barack Obama, who in politics came out of 2008 with their ticket punched more loudly than former Baseball Prospectus genius turned polling genius Nate Silver? It was a good year for geeks.
And then there's basketball, which is kind of in between baseball and football in stat utility. Since the last time I was heavy into the NBA however, folks like ESPN's John Hollinger have injected the stat geek's spirit into it, and several good ratio statistics have been introduced.
Some of the better basketball stats in terms of really seeing how well teams and players stack up are the points scored and allowed per 100 possessions, which compares efficiency against an even standard; and point differential (points scored minus points allowed). The differential can also be extrapolated in a quick formula to get what in baseball are called Pythagorean Wins: the expected win-loss total based on point differential. The excess is written off to luck and expected to be balanced out in the future as luck naturally turns.
These and other stats at the player level are combined by Hollinger into a PER stat, which estimates total production per minute, pace adjusted. One of the component stats that I think really gets to the essence of a particular skill is the suite of rebound stats. What Hollinger does is compute the percentage of all possible rebounds (offensive, defensive or both) that the player actually got. It stands to reason that every time a shot is missed and you're on the floor, in theory you should have a chance at a rebound and the best rebounders get the highest percentage of available boards.
I've spoiled the surprise, of course, but what I discovered while messing around with Hollinger's stats is that when it comes to rebounding, especially on the defensive end, there's no doubt that the best bound-for-bound glassman in the NBA is none other than the Vanilla Gorilla, Joel Pryzbilla.
I happened to see this ad for the first time last night, although apparently it's been out almost a year, and I about fell out of my chair with laughter. Greg Oden is a guy with a good sense of humor, is self-deprecating and can be very facially expressive. Which is all part of why this ad rocks, for ESPN Magazine. Enjoy!
ESPN College GameDay has confirmed it will produce its weekly college football preview show from the University of Oregon Saturday morning preceding the Ducks' home game vs. No. 6 California.
Kickoff for the football game, which will be televised regionally by ABC on ESPN, will be 12:30 p.m. (PDT).
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