Archive for the 'Just For Fun' Category

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.

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My colleague Doug Drinen of Pro-Football-Reference runs one of these things every year, and this time he's offered to keep track of scoring updates for a pool of our own here at BBR, which is awesome. First prize is I will do a post on the NBA player or team/season of your choice. Oh, and also honor and glory. What follows are Doug's rules:

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Yesterday I outlined a method for determining how similar the quality and arc of two players' careers were -- in case you missed it, the basic gist was that I minimized the sum of squared differences between year-by-year Win Share totals for any two players to find the best matches. I was surprised/overwhelmed by the response we got, so today I decided to take it a step further and try to match players' offensive and defensive Win Shares by age (instead of just total WS by season # of the player's career), which should give better matches than yesterday's method. Also, I felt old-school players were being shortchanged by a shorter schedule, so I pro-rated everyone's totals to 82 games, including this year's in-progress WS totals.

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Two summers ago, Doug made a great post over at PFR that asked a simple question: Who is the current Dave Duerson? If you don't know who Duerson was, he was a good (4-time Pro Bowl) but not great (he won't make the Hall of Fame) safety for the Bears in the mid-1980s; seeing as I was born in December '85, I only know who he was because I've watched tapes of the 1985 Patriots and he was one of the Chicago defenders in that regrettable game that ended the Patties' season. Anyway, the point of the question was to find a bridge that related Doug's frame of reference (he was a huge sports fan by the time '85 rolled around) to that of someone my age who didn't compulsively watch old Patriots tapes and therefore wouldn't have any way of knowing who a semi-notable SS from 1985 was.

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In honor of the long 2-week layoff between the NFL's conference championship games and a little event I like to call the Super Bowl, I was thinking about what the NBA would be like if it was structured the same way as the NFL -- 16-game schedules, heavy divisional play with a set rotation of intraconference division matchups, 6 teams from each conference make the playoffs, etc. What if the 2009-10 season so far was structured that way? Who would win the NBA's Super Bowl?

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Here an epic series of Sporcle quizzes I made:

All I can say is, good luck!

Here's a Sporcle quiz that I made myself: Can you name the missing words in Allen Iverson's May 2002 Rant?

Take the quiz, then watch the video:

Due to a tremendous amount of holiday-related backlog in my inbox as S-R's User Affairs Coordinator, we'll have to finish up the Inner-Circle Hall of Fame series on Wednesday. I know you're all so disappointed, but in the meantime, go to Sporcle, try to name the career leaders in eight statistical categories, and we'll be back with the 2000s before you know it. :)

Enjoy...

No basketball-related post or links today, just a Sporcle quiz on turkeys... Happy Thanksgiving, everybody!

(Fine, if you really want a Turkey Day post on hoops, last year we ran one on the best Thanksgiving Day performances since 1986... You can add Dwight Howard to that rebounding list, too, because he pulled down 14 vs. Washington last year. And if you want an Iverson fix, we ran a Keltner List on A.I. back in late February, which turned out to encompass all but the final few games of his career.)