What the ELO We Doing? Predicting Success with the Big 3

[ecuhus1981]

I've mentioned in previous threads that I made a W-L prediction calendar for the Nets, which has kept me steady on some of our turbulent times as a team. Overall, we're basically where I thought we'd be, but the upset wins and ugly loses bothered me. Is there a common thread in our outlier performances? I was wondering how exactly we measure against the popular ELO projection model, and where exactly we diverge from its game-by-game predictions.

Well, my findings indicate that... James Harden is really good. SHOCKER! Seriously, 7/11 are a phenomenal superstar duo, we're blessed and highly favored to have them. 13, though, is a whole different story. Basically, according to ELO, we're slightly worse than the sum of our parts this season when Kyrie and Kevin play. That's not a dig at them; ELO already rates us very high as a team, so it's really tough to exceed that expectation. The ceiling only goes so high. That is, unless you your talking about The Bearded One! You can see it on the court, but the numbers bear it out as well; we're even better than ELO predicts us to be, when James plays.

For this discussion, I've set aside the wins and losses that ELO (by chance of winning %) had successfully predicted. I'm defining an "ELO win" as winning the game despite ELO predicting us to lose. An "ELO loss" is the exact opposite, where the model expected us to win and we lost. Make sense?

My very manual, very fallible research and calculations from game logs show that:

With Irving: 6 ELO wins, 14 ELO losses
Without Irving: 3 ELO wins, 3 ELO losses

With Durant: 4 ELO wins, 9 ELO losses
Without Durant: 5 ELO wins, 9 ELO losses

With Harden: 9 ELO wins, 6 ELO losses
Without Harden (since 1/14): 1 ELO win, 5 ELO losses

We have the highest ELO winning % of any of these 3 with James, and the lowest without him.

Wanna guess which was that one Harden-less ELO win? Correct, Saturday's improbable comeback win at Denver! Before that, we had not pulled off a W that we were favored to lose without him, and we had lost about 30% of the ones in which we were favored.

I've said enough. What are your thoughts?

[bubonicphoniks]

I have no idea what ELO is.

Sent from my SM-G998U using RealGM mobile app

[ecuhus1981]

I have no idea what ELO is.

Sent from my SM-G998U using RealGM mobile app

It's a prediction model. It gives you a percentage chance of a team winning or losing a game.

These last two games versus Chicago and San Antonio were predicted wins for us, although @ CHI was close to a coin flip. I'm glad we took care of business, and the next two we might have all 3 superstars available.

[gigantes]

I thought "ELO" might refer to a different system, but no! ...It's evidently the same system I'm familiar with from chess and table tennis. Hard to believe chess would have something significant in common with bball, but here we are.

Code: Select all

ELO   EQUIVALENT RECORD   TEAM DESCRIPTION
1800      67-15         All-time great
1700      60-22         Title contender
1600      51-31         Playoff bound
1500      41-41         Average
1400      31-51         In the lottery
1300      22-60         LOL
1200      15-67         Historically awful

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-we-calculate-nba-elo-ratings/

Actually, that appears to be a specially-tweaked version of Elo, different from the original forms. In TT and chess for example, player ratings are more like 1000 for 'reasonably-accomplished beginner,' 2000 for expert-level, and the best players in the world might approach 2800-2900 ELO. But I digress.

So, FWIW looks like the Nets would be rated something like 1635 on that scale. Good, but probably underperforming given the talent, with injuries being the main culprit AFAIK.

Anyway, on r/NBA and r/GoNets, I've also seen pretty much every advanced-stat comparison like this go the Beard's way. Indeed, I'm not convinced the Nets can beat the very best teams in the league without Harden playing point. Meanwhile, Kyrie reminds me a bit of AIlen Iverson-- phenomenally talented and tough player who nevertheless hurts you to some degree due to how much he handles the ball for an undersized SG. If it would somehow have been possible (and I don't think it would have been), I wonder if the team wouldn't have been better off including Kyrie in the trade for Harden and keeping an asset / player or two. Not just because of being able to keep more, but because KD & the Beard seem like a more efficient fit, assuming healthy.

Hopefully I'm wrong on the Kyrie musings, though.