Archive for the 'Data Dump' Category

No commentary, just the numbers from the series...

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Yesterday, we had a discussion about Kobe Bryant's surprisingly Vince Carter-esque numbers in career "crucial" games (defined as a Conference Semifinal game or later; Game 3 or later; series tied, within 1 game either way, or an elimination game for the trailing team). A commenter brought up the possibility that Bryant had faced tougher defenses than other stars in his playoff career, so today I'm going to run the numbers for players since 1991 and see who actually has faced the toughest defenses in their playoff careers, first in all games, then just in "crucial" games.

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After watching Marv Albert's fantastic interview with President Obama a few nights ago, I ended up unearthing this old video, Marv's dramatic setup for Game 5 of the 1997 Finals:

Marv was at his best in that clip, practically lending biblical overtones to John Stockton's feats in Game 4, and I was so inspired by Albert's proclamation that Stock "seized the moment like few others in NBA history" that I wanted to find the players who had the best career performances in crucial games like that Game 4.

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With a 2-0 lead in their conference semifinal series, this year's Suns team is currently looking like a good bet to defeat their hated archrivals, the San Antonio Spurs, and make the Western Conference Finals. The Suns have never advanced past the Conference Finals in the Nash era, and this year's likely WCF opponents have been a tough nut for Phoenix to crack, but it looks like the 2010 season is shaping up to be as good an opportunity as any in recent memory for Phoenix to make the Finals.

If you had told me a few years ago that we'd be saying this in May of 2010, after Mike D'Antoni departed and Steve Kerr shifted the franchise's direction with the acquisition of Shaquille O'Neal for Shawn Marion, I would have said you were crazy. Even now, this Suns team doesn't "feel" as great as the team that went deep in the 2005/06/07 playoffs, but here they are, with a chance to do something that the earlier incarnations of the Nash Suns never did. So how do these Suns stack up to Phoenix's past playoff teams?

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As a quick follow-up to my post this morning about the best elimination-game performances by total points and John Hollinger's "Game Score", I took commenter Mike G's advice and calculated single-game Win Shares for each player in an elimination game as well. Here are the Top 100 performances by WS since 1991 in a playoff game where the player's team was one loss away from going home for the summer:

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Playoffs Home ▪ 2010 Playoff Previews

On the eve of the 2010 Playoffs, I thought it'd be cool to run down the current list of winningest NBA "people" -- players and coaches. We know which coaches coached which games, so we can give them accurate credit for W-L records, but if you recall for players, we have to estimate the team's W-L record for games in which they appeared. Fortunately, this is pretty easy and a pretty decent kludge: take the team's winning percentage in all games (in this case, all playoff games in a season) and multiply by the player's games played for wins, then subtract that from his games for losses. This isn't perfect, but in the absence of pre-1991 playoff gamelogs, it's the best we can do (and it's pretty darned accurate for such a simple solution). With the explanation out of the way, here are the winningest playoff "people" of all time:

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Today is the last day of the 2010 regular season -- and in honor of that, here's a list of each franchise's all-time W-L records on the official final day of the NBA regular season:

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This is basically a big data dump, but I thought I'd share the thought process & methodology involved. The premise is to find players whose teams won more postseason games than they were "supposed to" based on their regular season winning %'s and those of their playoff opponents (if this sounds familiar, you may have seen this Doug Drinen post, which Google found for me about halfway through the creation of this post)...

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This is another stab at something I've worked on for years -- the idea is to take the performance for each team in the Four Factors, and find teams with similar profiles in the past to determine how teams of that ilk eventually do in the playoffs. Here's the methodology:

1. Calculate the Four Factors for each team on offense and defense (technically, I guess that would make it Eight Factors, but whatever).
2. Calculate the Z-score for each team's factors by subtracting the league average and dividing by the league's standard deviation.
3. Compute the difference between the two teams' z-scores and square it... Do this for all 8 factors.
4. Add the squared differences together, weighted by the following: Offensive & defensive eFG% --> 0.2 each; offensive & defensive TOV% --> 0.125 each; offensive & defensive ORB% --> 0.1 each; offensive & defensive FT rate --> 0.075 each.

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Many NBA fans like to measure players by team accomplishments like wins and championships, perhaps because that is every team's ultimate goal before each season, and to a certain extent all players on teams that didn't win the championship have failed. With this in mind, I decided to compile a list of the greatest winners in NBA history (since 1952, at least) by taking the minute-weighted average of winning % and SRS for the teams they were on. Since we don't have game logs for players prior to 1986-87, this will serve as a reasonable proxy for what Dean Oliver calls "game by game winning percentages", or the team's W-L% when a player played for them. We'll break things up into 2 divisions -- small samples (those with at least 2,000 career MP but fewer than 10,000) and large samples (those with at least 10,000 career MP) -- and look at the best and worst players by career WPct and SRS. First, the top winning percentages:

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