Daryl Morey - The Man that Sold the World (Takedown)

[moofs]

Miami Heat was 4.8 this year. If they had three peated would they be considered a mediocre team?
Mavericks were the champs in 2011 with a 4.2 pd in the regular season and 57 wins.

4.8 was the best in the east, and they lost in 5. The west had 6.3, 7, and 7.7 (spurs, champs).
It's not like having the best PD guarantees a win, but in 100 games, a team with a 4 PD is probably going to win the majority of the matchups against a team with a 3.6 PD.

Had we magically made it out of the west, we'd have matched up very well with the Heat. Key part of that statement being the first half of it.

In your Mavs example, the Mavs (4.8) beat the Blazers (1.5) as they should have, upset the Lakers (6.1, 1.3 better), then beat OKC (3.8, about even) before upsetting the Heat (7.5). It helped that the Spurs (5.7) were upset by the Grizz (2.3) in the first round, and that the other strongest teams of the league [Chicago (7.3), Orlando (5.5), and Boston (5.4)] were in the East that year. To put it in perspective, it would've been like the Heat winning against a clearly better Spurs team this year. Accomplishable, but it's not a good idea to bet on it. (Or maybe it is, I still have some trouble understanding how to set up gambling payoffs.)

Meanwhile, if the Heat (4.8) had threepeated against the Spurs (7.7), they certainly wouldn't have been widely considered to be a mediocre team but rather a DYNASTY, but that's because a VERY small minority of fans look at process and odds instead of results. In very absolute terms, mediocre is mediocre, regardless of results, and I'd have still considered them mediocre. The big difference is in the drama, rooting for the underdog and all that.

If I had a penny for every time I'd heard the "but he has a ring" argument coming up when arguing some players' merits, I'd be a rich, rich man right now.

More realistically, I'd probably have a few hundred bucks, or maybe even a couple thousand, but still. That's a lot of times.

[texasholdem]

Miami Heat was 4.8 this year. If they had three peated would they be considered a mediocre team?
Mavericks were the champs in 2011 with a 4.2 pd in the regular season and 57 wins.

4.8 was the best in the east, and they lost in 5. The west had 6.3, 7, and 7.7 (spurs, champs).
It's not like having the best PD guarantees a win, but in 100 games, a team with a 4 PD is probably going to win the majority of the matchups against a team with a 3.6 PD.

Had we magically made it out of the west, we'd have matched up very well with the Heat. Key part of that statement being the first half of it.

In your Mavs example, the Mavs (4.8) beat the Blazers (1.5) as they should have, upset the Lakers (6.1, 1.3 better), then beat OKC (3.8, about even) before upsetting the Heat (7.5). It helped that the Spurs (5.7) were upset by the Grizz (2.3) in the first round, and that the other strongest teams of the league [Chicago (7.3), Orlando (5.5), and Boston (5.4)] were in the East that year. To put it in perspective, it would've been like the Heat winning against a clearly better Spurs team this year. Accomplishable, but it's not a good idea to bet on it. (Or maybe it is, I still have some trouble understanding how to set up gambling payoffs.)

Meanwhile, if the Heat (4.8) had threepeated against the Spurs (7.7), they certainly wouldn't have been widely considered to be a mediocre team but rather a DYNASTY, but that's because a VERY small minority of fans look at process and odds instead of results. In very absolute terms, mediocre is mediocre, regardless of results, and I'd have still considered them mediocre. The big difference is in the drama, rooting for the underdog and all that.

wow you really buy into the whole analytics movement huh?
Mavs were 4.2 pd in 2011 not 4.8
and shame on you for perpetuating the myth that our championship teams were among the worst in NBA history.

[moofs]

wow you really buy into the whole analytics movement huh?

Well, yeah, kinda. Always have? Certainly since I've been on this forum.
95% of wins can be predicted through point differential. Seems accurate enough to me.

Mavs were 4.2 pd in 2011 not 4.8

Oops, 4.8 was Denver.

and shame on you for perpetuating the myth that our championship teams were among the worst in NBA history.

Ha! Dude, how dominant or weak they were has absolutely nothing to do with how much I loved that team.
I still have the VHS tapes, posters, a laminated 7 foot tall Hakeem poster from The Post, and all sorts of other fun stuff.
Emotions are separate from critical analysis

Truth be told, I think a major reason that team looks so inefficient when looking at the stats globally was Maxwell. Cassell didn't really shine from an efficiency standpoint until later in his career, either, but take at least Maxwell out (which they did) and they're a lot better. Unfortunately it cost Thorpe and his .600 to do that.
In the playoffs we averaged 2.65 PD. Before Drexler, we were 30-17 with a PD of 3.06 (.63, 52 wins est), after we were 17-18 with a PD of 0.86 (.48, 40 wins est).

I've been told time and time and time and time again that one big reason that a bunch of people hated the Heat so much was because the players created a dynasty through eschewing competition, and that people love to root for the underdog rather than a bunch of guys that're just trying to game the system to win. Houston WAS the underdog (it even said as much on the videos - "Denying the odds", "Ignoring reality", etc). The way I see it, the more underdog we were, the more impressive the victory was. I like the outliers: extreme greatness, and success in spite of extreme odds.
As much as I trash Iverson, that's the reason I actually enjoyed the first 6-8 years of his career. Total underdog, and for whatever flaws he had, the man had NO lack of fight in him.
That's why I enjoyed Hakeem, extreme greatness, humility, and class.

I dunno. Opinions are opinions.

Here's a fun stats article I just ran into
http://skepticalsports.com/?page_id=1222

[BaYBaller]

I forget where I saw it but I remember somebody doing a statistical analysis on PD and it had a very very high correlation with winning the championship. Might've been something on Grantland.

[moofs]

I forget where I saw it but I remember somebody doing a statistical analysis on PD and it had a very very high correlation with winning the championship. Might've been something on Grantland.

Same, but I couldn't find the article.

Confound you, internet, all that information and absolutely no way to find it.
Someone should make some kind of a search engine or something to sift through all that crap.

[spolgar]

Dallas paid 15 million dollars above market value for Parsons over the course of the next three years, because Cuban wants to win now. Dirk took a huge paycut to do it, and look at their free agent signings, they've reloaded. All they need is a dietician to get Raymond Felton to lose 30 pounds before camp.

We would've signed Parsons, even if it was to the tune of 15 mill a year IF Bosh didn't go back to Miami for 120+ million different reasons. We decided to commit less to a team that wasn't going to win the chip. What's wrong with that? Without Bosh, Asik and Lin, there's no way we're not gunning for the ship.

This team has terrible chemistry on the court. Now that they've traded away half the bench for cap space. We're not going to win anything anyway, why not be financially flexible? The cap is 63 million. We're at 49 million in salary right now with two top 10 players in the league, with around another 4.5 (Alonzo Gee and Scotty Hopson) million in unguaranteed salay to boot. We are under the cap, with both the MLE and the BAE to boot.

Spending money on Parsons is just anchoring ourselves to the mediocrity treadmill. Doing otherwise would be an act of desperation. Sometimes it's just better to retreat after a lost gamble and trade in your chips until you have a better plan.

We weren't mediocre last year with Parsons. We were a pretty good team, even sweeping the eventual world champs. They could have traded Asik and Lin for Boozer and had a pretty good front line. Ariza is only making 7 million less than Parsons. Is that really that big of a savings? Not to mention we helped 3 western conference teams get better.

Hakeem and JVG both thought this was a championship caliber team. Do you know more than them?

Having a squad of Jeremy Lin, Asik, Beverly, Harden, Parsons, Howard and change is not a mediocre team.

Having a squad of Beverly Harden, Parsons, Howard with no room to maneuver however is a mediocre team, and we'll stay mediocre for awhile because the salaries would be right at the edge of the cap, which means we'll only have the MLE and the BAE to sign players.

Decent players are getting scarcer by the minute. I mean, Anthony Tolliver just got signed for 3 million a year. He was parked for 880k 2 years ago and was a minimal salary guy in Minneapolis for another year before that. We're starting to see teams overpay for talent.

Maybe we could've traded Lin and Asik for Boozer, so long as Jerry Cheapsake Reinsdorf wasn't the owner of the Bulls. He wasn't going to match Asik two years ago at 5,5,15, why do you think he's going to that now for the last year of two poison pill contracts? That guy is notoriously cheap. The guy wouldn't even sign Luol Deng for an extension last year.

7 million less than Parsons isn't a great deal of money in terms of max contracts, but the cap is 63 mill. If you get Parsons, you can't trade him for awhile too. Once you opt out and he signs an offer sheet, you can't sign and trade him. So with Harden at 15, Howard at 20, Parsons at 15, you're already at 50. So you moved Lin and Asik for 16 free in cap, but you lose it immediately with Parsons and only get about the change in 1 mill, plus whatever the difference in cap figure was between and last year (4 mill and change right?). You get 5 mill to sign someone. You get another 5 for the MLE and 2 for the BAE, and you can't mix the MLE number with under the cap salary, nor can you mix the BAE money with the MLE money. Now we find 3 players to sign for 5, 5, and 2 mill a piece. These aren't pieces that will put us over the top.

In terms of fit and matchups in our division and our conference, we couldn't even beat Portland in the playoffs. Oklahoma and the Clippers had our number in the regular season. Dallas, even without Parsons, retooled in a _huge_ way. Memphis got better with Vince Carter. Even if we made no changes in line up this off season, the rest of the division got better, let alone the conference. We weren't even the best team in the conference last year, we have a gaping gash at the 4, our best point guard and our best shooting guard can't play next to one another. Our backup center was suppose to play along side our starting center for this twin towers thing, and after acquiting these assets, we gave up on a season long plan to mesh two players after 7 games.

JVG and Hakeem said that this was a championship team... We might have championship talent, but we certainly didn't play like a championship team if we couldn't more than one game between the Thunder and the Clips during the regular season. We certainly didn't have a championship coaching staff. So it remains to be seen why you are trotting out statements that aren't true even if the statements were muttered by more famous people.