Nuggets:42.2% chance of winning the series Golden State: 59.6% chance of winning the series That one is suspect.
Please delete if not allowed here Before the playoffs began, I made a chart of the odds teams faced based on their regular-season results. Like any good economist, I built this chart based on certain assumptions. Most importantly, I assumed that a team's regular-season results accurately portrayed its relative strength heading into the playoffs. Unfortunately, we know what happens when you assume. I mentioned in passing that the numbers I used aren't aware of factors like injuries and hot streaks, but perhaps I should have made that point more stridently. In at least three cases, we have a darn good reason to believe that the odds given to a team are far different from what the chart shows. One of those is obvious -- Washington's odds in the chart are slim anyway, but in reality they're subzero thanks to the injuries to Gilbert Arenas and Caron Butler. But the other two may not be as apparent, even after Sunday night's games. Neither Golden State nor Denver was given much of a shot by my method, which made sense given that they faced perennial Western Conference powers Dallas and San Antonio. However, my method may have greatly underestimated them. Although I used the Hollinger Power Rankings as the basis for my model, a method which weighs recent performance more heavily, one can argue the weight in this case wasn't nearly heavy enough. The mediocre results for both teams in the first two-thirds of the season dragged down their rating despite impressive finishes. Consider the Nuggets, for instance. They hit several bumps at midseason between the 15-game fighting suspension for Carmelo Anthony, the trade for Allen Iverson, and the almost immediate injury to Iverson after he arrived. When the dynamic duo finally took to the court together, it took some time for the chemistry to build. Denver lost seven of its first 10 games with the vaunted A.I.-Melo pairing, leading some to wonder if the two could coexist on the court. But if you look at the recent history, you'll get a completely different story. Since March 11, the Nuggets are 17-6 -- 17-5 if you throw out the Toronto game, a Raptors layup drill which, not coincidentally, Marcus Camby missed with back spasms. While we're at it, the three games after Denver clinched the No. 6 seed in the West aren't worthy of our interest either, so let's throw those out too. If you do that you're left with 19 games -- nearly a quarter of a season -- in which Denver's three best players (Iverson, Anthony and Camby) all participated and the team had something at stake. Tally up the numbers from those contests and you'll get some interesting results. For starters, Denver is 15-4 in those games, including Sunday's Game 1 upset in San Antonio. That's a 65-win pace if you're scoring at home. SPURS' FULL SEASON VS. NUGGETS DURING STREAK SPURS NUGGETS W-L 58-24 15-4 Offensive Efficiency 106.7 107.9 Defensive Efficiency 97.4 101.9 Scoring margin +8.4 +5.9 Moreover, the Nuggets' statistical profile starts to look rather Mav-ish. In those 19 games their defensive efficiency improved to 101.9 -- a figure only seven teams bettered in the regular season. So much for those "enver" jokes -- they actually have been playing some decent defense. It's just been masked by their frantic pace -- at 99.2 possessions a game, they're the second-fastest team in the league. Meanwhile, the offense has been clicking. Denver's offensive efficiency of 107.9 would rank third in the league for the full season -- only Dallas and Phoenix have been better. Clearly, the Iverson-Anthony combo is beginning to hit on all cylinders, as the Spurs found out in Game 1. All told, Denver has outscored its opponents by 112 points over its past 19 games, a scoring margin of 5.9 points per game. What makes it more impressive is that 12 of the 19 games were on the road. If we consider that as Denver's "true" strength rather than its full season results, this series starts to look a lot more interesting. The Nuggets would have entered as an underdog still, but with a 21.6 percent chance of the upset -- better than any underdog except New Jersey. And after the Game 1 road win, you have Denver entering Game 2 with 42.2 percent odds of taking the series. In other words, it's nearly a toss-up at this point. But Denver has nothing on Golden State. Perhaps it's fitting that Jessica Alba will be in Oakland this weekend, because the Warriors are smoking hot right now. Consider: The Warriors were 26-35 on March 4 after Don Nelson's technical foul at the buzzer cost them the game against Washington. Since then they're 17-6, including a surprisingly easy Game 1 win at Dallas. It's not a coincidence that this is also when guard Baron Davis returned to the lineup, giving the Warriors a healthy backcourt for the first time all season. Yes, a couple of these games get an asterisk -- particularly those in the final week, which consisted of a blowout of Dallas' scrubs and routs of the Tankerwolves and Tank Blazers. On the other hand, Davis missed a game in that stretch which accounted for one of the five losses, and he only lasted 11 minutes in a squeaker over Memphis. Let's throw all of those out and just focus on the games Davis started and finished since he came back, and games played against teams that actually were trying to win. That gives us 17 contests to work with, and the Warriors' record in those games was 13-4. MAVS' FULL SEASON VS. WARRIORS DURING STREAK MAVERICKS WARRIORS W-L 67-15 13-4 Offensive Efficiency 108.5 108.8 Defensive Efficiency 100.6 102.3 Scoring margin +7.2 +6.6 Surprisingly, the small-ball Warriors have become competent defenders in that stretch -- even with Al Harrington masquerading as a center. Golden State's defensive efficiency in those 17 games is 102.3, which would rank ninth in the NBA. This tends to be obscured by the fact that they play the league's fastest pace, so occasionally they'll give up big point totals -- Golden State allowed 110 or more points five times in those 17 games. But the return of Davis, who is an awesome defender when motivated, clearly has pumped up the D. And, like Denver, the Warriors have put together a devastating offensive attack. Golden State's offensive efficiency in this stretch is 108.8, which for the season was bested only by Phoenix. That's doubly impressive considering the 17-game stretch included several elite defensive teams: two games against the Spurs and Mavs, for instance, and one each against the Rockets and Pistons. Golden State's victory margin in that time is even more impressive than the Nuggets': An average of +6.6 points per game -- nearly matching the +7.2 that Dallas rang up during its 67-win season. And as with Denver, it was a slightly road-heavy slate, with nine contests away from home. Throw those numbers into the machine, and suddenly the Warriors-Mavs series gets a lot more interesting. The Warriors entered the series with a 37.8 percent chance of winning, and after the Game 1 upset -- get this -- there's a 59.6 percent chance of Golden State taking the series. In other words, the 67-win team is now the underdog. So with that said, here's the big question: How much faith do we put in these late-season surges, and the revised odds that flow from them? Certainly the exercise above puts both the Nuggets and Warriors in the best light possible, evaluating them only with 100 percent healthy lineups and only during their most recent runs of success. Nonetheless, it does seem to have some relevance. In both cases, the evaluation period is nearly a quarter of a season, so it's not like our sample size is absurdly small. Additionally, there's a valid reason for evaluating these teams when fully healthy -- they're both fully healthy right now, and we're trying to determine how they'll fare in the immediate future. All told, then, I would venture to say that these numbers are a lot closer to reality for the Warriors and Nuggets than their original puny odds. And if that's the case, one has to consider another set of odds. Multiply the probabilities above and you'll find a 1-in-4 chance that both Dallas and San Antonio -- the two favorites to win the title -- fail to make it out of Round 1. Who said the first round wasn't going to be interesting?
awww...wait till next Monday sure the great odd sheet will change again, after every team has had at least 2 home games.
i dont know about that. I jsut want gs to take it to 7 games and wear out the mavs. BUt i wanna play the mavs and if everything works out, beat the hell outta em
