I think Hollinger's formula underrates Strength of Schedule. The Pacers should be behind both the Rockets and the Heat.
When the Pacers are 15-1 and the Rockets are 12-5? There's a lot to be said for taking care of business against weaker competition. We deserve to be penalized for our lack of execution at the end of games so far. I'd like our chances against the Pacers in a finals series, however.
another weekly power rankings http://www.nba.com/powerrankings/ (by John Schuhmann) (The Rockets are 7th this week, but we had 3 more winning games since the last release, so I'd guess our ranking will go up next week.)
LOL @ Pacers L10 SOS: .396 Good for them that they're winning but lets see how they fare after a couple WC road trips
Hollinger stats have a problem. http://espn.go.com/nba/hollinger/teamstats/_/sort/reboundRate How is it possible that we have the highest rebounding rate in the league when there are teams that have a better offensive and defensive rebounding rate than us (e.g. Chicago). Something is wrong here.
You don't understand. They're in the Eastern Conference. That means even their "weaker competition" is utterly inferior. The 3-12 Knicks would be lucky to have one single win if they were in the Western conference. The talent level gap between the two leagues has gotten so bad that you can't even take player statistics too seriously in the Least anymore, you have to take them with a grain of salt.
You're assuming the number of rebounding opportunities on both sides of the floor is equal, which may not be the case. If a team has a 65% DRR and a 0% ORR but hardly ever misses a shot, they still will have an overall rebound rate of nearly 65%. I do think it makes more sense to look at DRR and ORR separately rather than combine them in this way, though.
I totally agree with you about player statistics, and in fact I pointed out in another thread that the disparity between the conferences was getting so pronounced that there needed to be conference-adjusted advanced stats. I'm not sure exactly how Hollinger calculates strength of schedule, but it's not just based on opponents' win-loss record, is it? Doesn't it factor in the strength of opponents' schedules as well, as would be done for chess rankings or computerized college rankings? At any rate, we've still lost a game against an Eastern Conference opponent, whereas the Pacers have only lost one game period. At the current stage in the season, in all fairness, I think we have to be ranked below them. That said, I'm bullish on our potential this year, so long as we get and stay healthy and Asik either doesn't pout or is traded for player(s) of equal value. We are a legitimate contender.
what JBar said, basically. Even though we're not getting a "high" percentage of d rebounds, we're still over 70% on them. And we get a lot of D rebound chances, because other teams are shooting a low FG% against us. Other teams don't get as many D rebound chances against us, because we have a high FG%, and easily the highest Free throw rate.
So you're saying that Houston, which is a terrible defensive rebounding team, is generating so many defensive rebounding opportunities that it still leads the league in overall rebounding rate! Wow. I guess that could be but that's pretty incredible. It means we must get a TON of defensive rebounds even if it is at a poor rate.
Heres my power rankings with record against +.500 teams in () 1. Miami (5-0) 2. San Antonio (6-2) 3. OKC (6-2) 4. Indiana (2-1) 5. Portland (5-3) 6. L.A.C (5-4) 7. Houston (5-4) See a pattern?
Yep, we've played one of the weakest schedules in the west. NO .464 Portland .473 Spurs .489 Rox .494 Thunder .505 T'wolves .512 Mavs .516 GSW .520 Jazz .523 Lakers .524 Suns .536 Clips .540 Denver .554 Sacto .569 Memphis .587 Of course, when your record's bad, that depresses all your opponents' SOS and makes your own SOS appear stronger, like the Jazz. And when your record's good, vice versa.
Yes. If you take the per-minute difference between defensive rebounding opportunities and offensive rebounding opportunities for every team, we have the highest mark by a huge margin (+2.3 per 48 minutes, which is 2.65 standard deviations above the average; second highest is +1.5 for the Pacers).
Sun already faced Portland 3 times, Spurs twice, Heats once and OKC one. That's 7 games against the teams with the best record now. And only 2 games behind Houston. For Rockets, the only team we played that consider contender is clippers twice. So yea, Suns is better than Rockets.
