Pau Gasol played the most minutes of his career, he's on the wrong side of 30, and was complaining about fatigue throughout the season. I've been critical of Phil Jackson's coaching the past few years, and he failed this time like he has in other instances (Fisher, Smush parker, Luke Walton, no Shannon, etc.). With the depth LA had there's no reason to put Pau out there that much. No need to downplay your own site, this place did a fine job of supporting my notion about health.

I know a huge Laker fan that said they would get dominated and lose easily.... Simply because Pau and Kobe looked done. It is that simple, you shouldn't overlook that factor Neil. That isn't gut based, their statistical decline is tangible in the first round. Life isn't completely fair and people get injured at the wrong time, or play too many minutes, or whatever.

Dallas was the best team in the NBA when healthy, the stats clearly showed that before the Finals and through the post-season. It didn't help Mike Bibby had the lowest playoff PER ever, also that Miami had much more wear on them with their attacking playing style and high MPG. Lastly, James Jones was Miami's fourth best player this season and he didn't get on the court at all.

in 07-08 Cleveland had 6 of the top 8.

in 09-10 Dallas and Cleveland had each spot in the top 7 with Cleveland having 4 of the players

However, in 08-09 Lakers had 3 of the top 6. Cleveland shared the other 3 spots.

In the end I'm not sure what that tells us.

Go to 82 games dot com, and look at their clutch stats for 2010-11. Then sort by the +/- per 48 minutes. The results will astound you.

Dirk, Marion, Kidd, Chandler, and Terry are 5 of the top 6 players! No other team has any result remotely close to this. This unit was remarkably efficient in the clutch -- perhaps to an unprecedented degree. I've never seen anything like it before. This wasn't a fluke sample either -- it covered 36 to 48 games, including 77 to 154 minutes of "clutch" time production.

Portland was coming off recent trades and several injuries to key players. LA was getting old and playing poorly. Oklahoma City was too young and inexperienced. Miami was a top heavy team that had only been together for one season, and was weak at the key positions of PG and C.

The Mavs were the best team in the NBA last season, but people wrote them off because of their previous recent playoff flops.

The proof is in the pudding and a good computer predictor will end up in the plus column over the long run.

As for human predictors, most people will lose money in the betting markets but a small percentage of humans are good enough to win year after year. I can attest to this through personal experience.

I'm not trying to make a hero out of the man. I'm putting out there was a "computer" which saw this whole thing playing out like it did.

I'm of the mindset that there is a perfect model out there that is yet undiscovered.I liked arturo's work this postseason. Even if the model had Miami in 7, it provided some pretty good insight along the way. I like his reverse engineering concept. I think that is a huge step in the right direction.

"I’m putting my faith in what Dallas has done lately and trusting the post All Star Break and playoff numbers."

Faith is definitely not science. In fact, science said "form is overrated", that there was no correlation between late-season performance and playoff success:

http://skepticalsports.com/?p=1246

Dallas, with its scorching 2nd half, happened to be the exception to that rule.

(And of course, I was guilty of over-weighting late-season games at times during the Stat Geek Smackdown as well. But I never claimed my picks were anything but gut calls merely informed by the stats... And that's the problem with injecting gut calls into a system -- there's no way to predict ahead of time whether the human interference will add or subtract from the accuracy.)