king_james_vers wrote:dockingsched wrote:Baseball lends itself to the best team consistently not winning the title due to how variable the small sample size of the playoffs can be and how that can affect a game. I’ll never consider any baseball matchup as a huge upset cause the better team loses all the time in a playoff series.
Nba has so many possessions to help the better team outshine the inferior team that often those teams don’t even stand a chance for one game.
Exactly.
Think about in the NBA how many times a game is won or lost based on 3-point performance in a given game. e.g. a team has an uncharacteristically hot/cold night shooting. MLB is like that, but on steroids.
Baseball is unique in that some success is beyond a batter's control. For example, a player could smoke the living daylights out of a ball, and it could be hit right at a well-positioned defender for an out. Meanwhile, another player could make weak contact, and have it fall in for a fluke bloop single. You can't really luck into baskets with poor shots in the NBA, except in extreme fluke edge cases.
You don't really see an analog like that in the NBA. If Curry has a shot with perfect form and execution, it's going in almost every time. A player's execution is much more closely correlated to results than in baseball, especially over a small sample size.
Also, individual talent is much more closely tied to success in the NBA. LeBron can appear in 10 Finals in a row, and meanwhile Mike Trout can make the playoffs 1 time in 10 seasons.
It's like what Billy Beane once said: "the playoffs are a **** crapshoot."
I agree with the premise but the variables are bigger and more pervasive than what you said IMO. First in basketball you're gonna score or be successful on that end about 50% of the time, while in baseball teams score in maybe, what, 20-25% of innings? Second is related to the thing you mentioned, that players have more direct control over their success--if Curry or Trae is rolling they can kinda will you to offensive success, while the best baseball players can't effect the game nearly that much. Plus Curry and Trae can lead the offense every single play while batters have to wait their turn, plus good scorers can score at around 60% efficiency (opposed to a good hitter batting .300 and .400 on-base), etc. Third, you generally need
streaks of good things in baseball to win--like if you get 5 hits in a row that's much much more valuable than getting 5 hits spread out across 3 innings. Basketball is often a game of streaks/runs but everything counts the same, hit a shot in the 1st quarter and it's two pts vs hitting a shot with 15 seconds left still 2 pts.
(Also you're right that sometimes good and bad contact end up in the opposite results, but generally speaking that's not true. Good contact gets you a a much, much, much better chance at success than weak contact, it's pretty rare that bad contact gets you anything good. And most times you club the ball square on you're gonna get at least a single, definitely happens that you hit it right at someone but it's not that common.)
