SmartWentCrazy wrote:yoyoboy wrote:SmartWentCrazy wrote:
That feels highly selective. Why shouldnt game 1 vs Philly count as an indicator of who Boston is because Brown sat out?
Because then it would be a biased assessment. The purpose of the comparison is to compare the two teams at "full strength" - which obviously doesn't mean with Kyrie and Hayward, but the teams going into the Conference Finals. If you decide to include one game that the Celtics happened to play well in without Brown, then should you also include a game such as the one against the Pelicans on March 18th where he was also the only guy from that core missing and the Celtics lost by 19? A 20 game sample size is enough to get at least a relative idea of how good a team is. And while Boston's performance against Game 1 without Brown does reflect the team's ability, it's only one game and over a larger sample size that would gradually "correct" itself as the Celtics are clearly a better team with Brown.
But thats my point— it should just be the ~30 games after Kyrie went down. Otherwise, youre being highly selective in your sample.
But what I'm saying is that the aim is to actually help Boston by only accounting for the games in which they had their major guys, seeing how they've performed in those games. If Boston got crushed in that Game 1 against Philly without Brown it wouldn't have been included either; the decision to include only the games at "full strength" wasn't made after the fact. I agree it's not perfect because obviously it depends on which guys you include as part of the core and the sample size could be larger, but it's something.
Regardless, I went ahead and looked at Boston's performance in the 35 games that Kyrie missed (including playoffs and the first game he got injured in which he only played 2 minutes). Boston's average MOV was +1.57. I didn't calculate the strength of schedule across those games, but if you assume it was roughly equal to Boston's SOS on the season - which was -0.35 in just the regular season but 0.50 if you include the playoffs - then the Celtics' SRS in games Kyrie missed would be +2.07. The highest SOS in the league this season was +0.57 across 82 games so even if you assume that Boston had the equivalent of the toughest schedule in the league in games without Kyrie and double that to account for more variation in half the sample size (35 games Kyrie missed versus an 82 game season) and apply an SOS of +1.14 to Boston, then that would result in an SRS of +2.71 "without Kyrie," though that kind of strength of schedule obviously is extremely unlikely. And worse case scenario (without even accounting for the greater variation) assuming they had as easy of a schedule in those games as the easiest schedule in the league (Toronto's SOS of -0.49) that would result in an SRS of +1.08.
