Currently we are 10-2 which is second in the league base on percentage 1. Golden Sate 13-2 2. Houston 10-2 3. San Antonio 14-4 4. LA Clippers 10-4 5. Cleveland 6-2
I understand this stat/measure as it is obvious the best teams will be very good here. That said, what is the background behind how it correlates to overall ending performance, playoff performance, etc.? Are there some stats/correlation that work to demonstrate this is statistically significant?... like we have for NetRtg for example? Just curious, thanks.
It is supposed to account for the home court advantage in the record. As you can see Cleveland has had a lot of home games which has inflated their record because so far the only have had 10 road games winning barely more than half. We on the other hand have had 15 road games winning two-thirds of them.
Right. I understand the metric. I know how it works. And everyone will eventually play the same number of games home/road. I guess what I'm asking for is positive correlations, with high r-squareds that show this metric is predictive in some way. Meaning 1/4 through the season it says very strong things about final record. Meaning at the end of the season it says very strong things about championship potential. My guess is those would exist. But even then... it's not clear if this is super helpful. The best teams will, by nature, do well here.
It *exactly* matches W/Ls at the end of the season. It is a mathematical fact. At end of season, Road Wins v Home Losses exactly matches team rankings. It is the only "stat" that is tied directly to real W/Ls. During the season, it works better than W/L rankings, because of schedule skewing in favor of more Home games played at any time in the season. Pat Riley first brought this up as a Knicks coach, as I recall. That's why I call it the "Riley Stat." I use this daily as a very easy way to look at standings and see more than just W/Ls. No, at the end of the season, it won't say anything more to Championship potential as Wins/Losses does. You are probably looking for something based on Point Differential for playoff predictive potential. This is just for easy to spot rankings through the season.
Gotcha. Makes sense. So during the season it's a good ranking indicator in a way that a real good strength of schedule adjusted record would do.
Right. imo, it's advantage is ease of use, based on it's availability with most all Standings lists...even offline newspapers. This was very helpful back before standings started showing Pt Differential and other adv stats. And the more complicated pt differential-based stats are not always better at mid-season anyhow. @durvasa and I tracked this once a few seasons ago, to test it. But they do tend to be better at Playoff Performance predictions. fwiw: The original Win% predictor was the Pythagorean Theorem formula for Basketball, which many other formulas use to some degree. It is based on Bill James formula for Baseball, from Sabermetrics fame, which *only* uses runs scored and given up. I mention this for historical curiosity. Guess who tweaked by that Bill James formula back in 1994 to accommodate to the NBA Spoiler: Guess who? That's right...Daryl Morey. He figured out the exponents need to be 13.91 versus 2, for NBA vs Baseball. And the famous picture of him at the chalkboard is that very formula, for which he is credited. Pretty cool, 'eh
Could be. I'm sure all coaches look at this. I heard it from Pat before Rudy was even a coach. Hell, I've started a thread about this stat nearly every year for 16 years on this BBS (at least when to show we are overrated by W/L or vice versa), because it's my favorite predictive stat, due to ease of use. And every year I'd put Pat Riley in the title or OP. You mean, we've never discussed this before?
