Ed Kupfer, who I believe has worked for the Rockets, tweeted a cool graph comparing the difficulty of schedule for the remainder of each team's season. He also stated that the measure of difficulty accounts for not only opponent quality, but also home vs. away and the # of rest days for both the team itself and its opponent. <blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p>Who has the easiest remaining NBA schedule? <a href="http://t.co/EnYVRlAO" title="http://i.imgur.com/FYGeP.png">i.imgur.com/FYGeP.png</a></p>— ed kupfer (@EdKupfer) <a href="https://twitter.com/EdKupfer/status/285642028283482113" data-datetime="2012-12-31T07:02:21+00:00">December 31, 2012</a></blockquote> <script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script> The difficulty of the Rockets' remaining schedule appears to be a little below average. Spoiler
Nice, we can count Minnesota and Portland out of the playoffs then since they have the 1st and 7th hardest schedule respectively. We have the 10th easiest schedule
Carl: Great post but I am getting cross-eyed looking at chart. BTW, how you intepret those blue lines?
Huge difference than what this guy calculated. (Maybe his mom drove the car and messed up his EQ settings)
I'd be curious to know how the difficulty of the game/matchup was determined. Is strength of schedule up to this point taken into consideration? For example, Denver is around .500, but likely a much better team than that given their home/road imbalance.
Unless I'm mistaken, what you posted is strength of schedule up to this point. Carl Herrera posted the difficulty of the remaining schedule.
We will be okay as long as we refuse to play THUNDER/SPURS/BLAZERS for the rest of the season! ............. ............. .............
Thanks for sharing. There's a good chance that GSW might slip and Denver moving up. While Lakers and Mavs will play better with Nash and Dirk returning, their schedule is relatively more difficult. I like our chances of holding the playoff spot if we can play well enough in Jan.
I think the main difference Kupfer and the chart jocar posted is how they measure difficulty of schedule and how much weight they put on it as oppose to opponent quality. One may only measure the Rockets's own # of B2Bs and the other may also measure that of the opponent. One might assign a higher importance to home vs. road than the other. They may also measure opponent quality differently: one might go by straight win% while the other goes point differential adjusted by schedule difficulty (like basketball-reference.com's SRS system does).
