2nd April 2010
More results from the 3rd round of the tournament, courtesy of WhatIfSports (click on series links for game-by-game box scores):
Posted in Insane ideas, Just For Fun, Playoffs | 6 Comments »
1st April 2010
Results through Round 2
Now it's time for the 3rd round of the tournament, courtesy of WhatIfSports (click on series links for game-by-game box scores):
Posted in Insane ideas, Just For Fun, Playoffs | 8 Comments »
31st March 2010
Now it's time for the second-round series from Pool A, courtesy of WhatIfSports (click on series links for game-by-game box scores):
Posted in History, Insane ideas, Just For Fun, Playoffs | Comments Off on Most Dominant Playoff Tournament: Pool A, Round 2
26th March 2010
Now it's time for the second-round series from Pool B, courtesy of WhatIfSports (click on series links for game-by-game box scores):
Posted in Insane ideas, Just For Fun, Playoffs | 7 Comments »
19th March 2010
Since WhatIfSports doesn't have a "neutral court" option for the NBA, I decided to make each matchup a 2-3-2 best-of-7 series to lessen the impact of HCA (home teams win 60% of the time in any 1 game, but only 53.2% in a 7-game series). Here are the opening-round series from Pool D (click on series links for game-by-game box scores):
Posted in Insane ideas, Just For Fun, Playoffs | 3 Comments »
18th March 2010
Welcome to the Most Dominant Playoff Tournament... Click here for more info!
Since WhatIfSports doesn't have a "neutral court" option for the NBA, I decided to make each matchup a 2-3-2 best-of-7 series to lessen the impact of HCA (home teams win 60% of the time in any 1 game, but only 53.2% in a 7-game series). Here are the opening-round series from Pool A (click on series links for game-by-game box scores):
Posted in Insane ideas, Just For Fun, Playoffs | 7 Comments »
17th March 2010
Two weeks ago, I posted about the most dominant NBA teams of all time over the course of the entire season, and the results basically featured the usual suspects: the '96 Bulls, the '71 Bucks, the '86 Celtics, etc. However, I didn't have the 2001 Lakers on the list because they weren't dominant for the entire season -- because of some injuries (and because they felt they could "flip the switch" on when they really needed to), L.A. sleepwalked through the regular season, winning "just" 56 games after scorching the league to the tune of 67 in 2000 (they had to rattle off 8 straight at the end of the season to take the Pacific by a single game over Sacramento). They finished the regular season as the 2nd seed in the West behind San Antonio, and had the league's 6th-best SRS, hardly the stuff of a juggernaut... But in the playoffs, they were indeed able to flip the switch, unleashing a ridiculously dominant performance against Portland (#5 in SRS), Sacramento (#2), San Antonio (#1), and finally Philadelphia (#7), a run marred only by a single defeat in Game 1 of the Finals.
Posted in Insane ideas, Just For Fun, Playoffs, SRS | 21 Comments »
26th February 2010
This essay is a rather extreme case of late-night rambling -- just warning you ahead of time.
In case you stumbled upon this website and have no understanding of basketball, sports, or American culture in general, let me just say that the players in the NBA are really good at hoops. I mean, ridiculously good: so good that they have been dominant players their entire lives, at virtually every level. I always laugh when some fans are watching a game and say "I could do that!"... Well, no, you couldn't. The average fan seems to have a shaky grasp at times on the vast, gaping, astronomical chasm that exists between their own abilities (or even the abilities of the best basketball player they've ever known/played with) and those of the worst NBA player who ever played. There's simply no comparison there, as I learned the hard way when future D-Leaguer Patrick Ewing Jr. dunked over me, Freddy Weis style, in a high school AAU game in 2003. I was on a mediocre lower-tier HS team, we were playing the best crop of prospects in the state of Georgia (which at the time included Ewing, Stanford/Washington G Tim Morris, Evansville C Bradley Strickland, & Georgia Tech PG Matt Causey), and they beat us by nearly 100 points. And Ewing is the only player on that team with even a remote shot at the NBA! Talk about a harsh dose of reality.
Posted in Insane ideas, No Math Required, Rants & Ramblings | 13 Comments »
9th February 2010
Yesterday, I laid out a scenario which could be an unforeseen consequence of a new CBA which limited contract lengths and imposed a hard cap -- namely, that if a player with all-time-great type ability (let's call him "Jim LeBaron") was sufficiently motivated to chase rings at the expense of everything else, the incentive to keep him in one place for a long-term would be removed and he could conceivably ink a never-ending Tim Wakefield-esque string of one-year contracts with the top contender who had the cap room to sign him. Today, I'm going to run a program I built to simulate this scenario, and see how many titles Jim The Ring Vulture would grab on average.
Posted in Insane ideas, Statgeekery | 18 Comments »
8th February 2010
Labor issues abound as we head into the week of the NBA's biggest party, with the Commissioner reportedly presenting to the union a proposed CBA that would drastically reduce the players' share of basketball-related income, kill the Larry Bird exception, and severely limit long-term contracts & guaranteed salaries -- including existing deals! Understandably, NBAPA reps are miffed (Adonal Foyle called the proposal "rash", "unfair", and "ludicrous") but one effect of the new NBA financial landscape could be a generation of mercenary players who sign short contracts and hop from city to city, seeking max money and/or rings. Or at least that's how Bill Simmons saw it in his last mailbag:
"Q: Imagine if LeBron started a complete new trend starting in 2010 where he just decided, "Eff it, I'm winning a ring EVERY year" and signed one-year contracts EVERY YEAR for the biggest contender with cap space that could afford him. In true LeBron style, he begins a completely new type of superstar -- the "Superstar Hitman." It's as if we could have the 2010 LeBron sweepstakes EVERY YEAR! Can you imagine?
--Chris S., Brisbane, AustraliaSG: Don't laugh -- you might see a modified version of that. One of two things will happen with the NBA's next collective bargaining agreement: Either they'll have a harder cap with no luxury tax (like what happened with hockey), or they'll change it so that no contract can be guaranteed for more than three years. I'd wager on the latter idea because it protects the teams from themselves as well as one deal crippling them -- like Elton Brand with the Sixers right now -- and swings things a little more in their favor. (For instance, you could sign Amare Stoudemire to a six-year-max deal this summer knowing that, if things go wrong for whatever reason, you have an out after three.) But if it goes this way, and I think it will, LeBron would never have to sign more than a three-year deal anyway. So he could play for the Bulls for three years, then the Lakers from 2013 to 2016, then the Knicks from 2016 to 2019, then back to the Cavs to finish things out. The ultimate gun for hire."
Over the next few days, I'm going to create a simulation of this very scenario, where one transcendent, LeBron-esque 26-year-old free agent decides to go for a title every year by hopping onto one of the league's 5 best teams. How many rings would he win? What if he could only do it every 3 years? What if he stayed in his original location? These are all the kinds of crazy scenarios I'll be playing out, Monte Carlo-style, and if you have more bizarre, unintended consequences of a new CBA to ponder, suggest them down in the comments and I'll see what I can do.
Posted in Insane ideas, Statgeekery | 2 Comments »
