The renowned Baseball Pythagorean Win % formula that Daryl Morey adapted to the NBA (in photo) is predicting the Rockets at 78.7% winning percentage. We are currently at 78.9%. in photo points scored ^ 14 ------------------------------------------------ (points scored ^ 14 + opponent points ^14) Nice work on that exponent, Morey!!
we are officially overachievers. need to stop playing prince luc so much and run robert brown out there
Ironically, I'm pretty sure Joe Chee's three pointers screwed up Morey's calculation by that 0.02% error.
Unless I'm reading the formula wrong, it's not a predicting formula. It basically I guess just goes to how well you perform in close games, clutch situations.
You sure like to get into semantic debates. Bill James invented this formula to provide expected Wins from pts scored for and against. NBA and NFL have both successfully tweaked the exponent to suit their sport. “Expected/Predicted” same difference to me, albeit this is after the fact, of course. There’s a lot of theory on why it works and a lot of discussion of how it still works within the luck of the game. The counter point to your point about close game performance is it’s best to avoid close games, and high pt differential is a good indicator of teams that avoid close games.
you're right not really a prediction/before the fact but more like just a correlation between your total and opp points vs actual win% last year our number was 67% and our winning% was 67.1
Looks like an over complicated point differential which has always been proven to indicate how strong or weak a team is. Hubie Brown has been a leader of point differential and Win % since at least the 70s. I remember him in the 90s' & 00's broadcasts always going on about point diff. He's even quoted in the late 80s early 90s book "Loose Balls" with his own "formula" of prediction. "To me, a crucial statistic is point differential. If you average 100 points and give up 100 points, then you’ll win half of your games. If your point differential is three— you score 103 and give up 100— you have a very good chance of winning 50 games. You want to win 55 games? Then score 105 and give up 100. I’m telling you right now, a team that has a point differential of five will win at least 50 games. You can write that in cement. By the end of the season, our point differential was seven— 109 to 102. That’s astronomical. That’s the stuff of champions. And in the last 25 games where we won 22, we averaged 108 points and allowed 92, which is off the charts." - Hubie Brown quote from sometime between '89-'90. tldr; Hubie Brown has known all this ****, including diff:wins ratios, since 1970s baby. - Hubie
Lol, you hate morey! I remember you saying that luckily you are young enough to outlive moreys tenure here. He’s a good gm breh
yeah so if we keep the same pace for pt differential, 65 wins this year if we consider all games played already but 74 wins if we only consider the game CP3 & Harden has played so far
Pretty sure there are pre-season, predicting formulas out there that use this as the core formula. My understanding is they attempt to predict Team ORtg and Drtg performance, then merely plug those numbers into Morey's formula. I think they might even predict Pace to backward engineer the actual points in a game vs per 100 possessions.
It's basically the entire point in his question, I thought! I think this formula in particular is most interesting in teams that are meaningfully different then their expected W-L, and understanding why, and understanding how that then translates into total "success" for the season. Eg. look at all the teams that were higher than expected, teams that then made it to the playoffs, how they performed, and vice versa with lower than expected. Do you know if there's any studies on that type of stuff? Most particular to your post... a quarter way into the season, they are right on top of their expected W-L percentage. What exactly does that imply going forward??
as of right now, 538 projects is to finish with a record of 60-22 and be the 2nd seed/2nd best team in the league behind a 64 win GS squad we also have a 22% chance of making the finals and a 16% chance of winning the title (that 16% is the 2nd highest by a significant margin)
But did Morey leave a margin of error to compensate for CP3 being out so many gam.... Oh, that’s why CP3 was held out so long. Pure genius
