HartfordWhalers wrote:So, my point wasn't that it was a necessary condition even though this is what I said in my first post and then repeatedly afterwards?
In your first post you wanted to answer DBoys' request of getting a definition for the term "contender". You proclaimed, you have an easy one. May I remind you:
HartfordWhalers wrote:DBoys wrote:A "contender" is still undefined in this thesis, although it supposedly is the promised result of tanking. No way to examine whether that's true when we don't even know what it is.
You guys can keep going around the mulberry bush with your definitions of what is tanking, and how long a string can you tie between any two events. But what constitutes a contender should be easy -- you need one of the top 7 guys in the league.
You wanted to be smart, wanted to get applauded for that, nothing else. Just that your conclusion based on inductive reasoning has a major flaw: It isn't a definition. And that was my point from the beginning. If you would have honestly answered my question about how many contenders there are per season, we could have closed that up rather quickly. But no, you responded with strawman and just shifted the goalpost, from a definition to "necessary conditions". Yeah, it may be a "necessary condition" for a title-winning team to have a top7 or top5 or top10 or top-whatever player (depending on the choosen metric), but it is still insufficient and therefore not a definition. And that is what I'm arguing for, the whole time. And if you wouldn't have side-tracked the issue, and would have understood, that me replacing your "top players" with "good players" is just trying to point out the issue at hand with your method (and yeah, I can pick a threshold for that and will end up with less failure than having the 2012 Timberwolves (a team missing the playoffs) as a contender like your method has it), that discussion would have been over.
Matter of fact is that your method is not defining a contender, because a definition is per se sufficient! That is my whole point.
HartfordWhalers wrote:Focusing on the components of what is needed to win a title in that sort of manner seems far more productive than arguing how much of a SRS a team needs to be a contender, because that just begs the question of then what sort of components are needed for a large SRS.
No, you are trying to find something via inductive reasoning, and that is bound to fail. That is the whole issue of your approach. Only because something like that may be found in the title-winning teams you observed for that, doesn't mean that it is necessary to have such things in order to win, nevertheless in order to be a contender. The same is true for the opposite, a not contender may also have those ingredients you looked for.
And only because the title-winning teams had each a top10 player in my metric as well, doesn't change that at all. The issue is still there. Having a top10 player in my metric does not give me per se a contender. Sure, it may be helpful to have such player on the roster, but at the end of the day a player alone is not winning a championship, but teams do. It is important to know how good the team overall does, and yes, using a player metric like my merged SPM+RAPM as well as the minute distribution of the team during the playoffs gives me a better predictor than the SRS (or even the SRS in games with the 5 best players playing).
The minor issue of picking the MVP voting as your metric of choice to declare a player being in your top7 or not, is really just that, minor.
And someone, who responds to two questions with a strawman while using the word "dumb" to describe his feeling about those questions, shouldn't complain about "personal attacks" at all. ;)
