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vanexelent
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Joined: 17 May 2005
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 Posted: Sun May 24, 2015 7:19 am Post subject: |
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| Quote: | | Here’s how it goes. As we’ve said, Elo is all about accounting for the strength of a team’s competition, and the Western Conference over the past dozen or so years has featured about the toughest basketball competition imaginable. The Warriors’ 67-15 regular-season record is as good as any other Western Conference team from this era, |
Wait, what does the strength of the WC over the past decade have to do with who the Warriors faced this season? The Lakers, Thunder, Mavs and Spurs have dominated regular season play over the past decade. Suns too. None of those teams were contenders this year. |
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Aeneas Hunter
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Joined: 12 Jul 2005
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| Posted: Sun May 24, 2015 8:59 am Post subject: |
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| vanexelent wrote: | | Quote: | | Here’s how it goes. As we’ve said, Elo is all about accounting for the strength of a team’s competition, and the Western Conference over the past dozen or so years has featured about the toughest basketball competition imaginable. The Warriors’ 67-15 regular-season record is as good as any other Western Conference team from this era, |
Wait, what does the strength of the WC over the past decade have to do with who the Warriors faced this season? The Lakers, Thunder, Mavs and Spurs have dominated regular season play over the past decade. Suns too. None of those teams were contenders this year. |
The WC has been historically strong over the past few years, just as the WC was historically weak in the '80s. That affects the ELO ratings. It isn't a function of specific teams, but rather a function of quality of overall competition. We talk about the difference in quality between the EC and WC all the time. This year, the Warriors dominated an historically strong conference. You would expect the ELO ratings to reflect this, and they do.
The ELO ratings don't purport to tell you that Team A from Season X would have beaten Team B from Season Y. There are too many other changes in the game to make that analysis. Instead, the ratings tell you how a franchise rated against its competition over time. Thus the '09 Lakers rate slightly higher than the threepeat Lakers or the '80s Lakers relative to their competition at the time, not relative to each other.
As I said in the other thread on this subject, the ELO ratings are an interesting conversation piece and a reminder that the '09 team really was something special. We won 65 games and finished first in the conference by 11 games, in a year in which it took 48 wins just to make the playoffs in the West. That team ranks 11 ELO points higher than the '01 team, which had a great playoff run but won only 56 regular season games. Is that a meaningful difference? Really no. |
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vanexelent
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Joined: 17 May 2005
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| Posted: Wed May 27, 2015 8:47 am Post subject: |
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| Aeneas Hunter wrote: | | vanexelent wrote: | | Quote: | | Here’s how it goes. As we’ve said, Elo is all about accounting for the strength of a team’s competition, and the Western Conference over the past dozen or so years has featured about the toughest basketball competition imaginable. The Warriors’ 67-15 regular-season record is as good as any other Western Conference team from this era, |
Wait, what does the strength of the WC over the past decade have to do with who the Warriors faced this season? The Lakers, Thunder, Mavs and Spurs have dominated regular season play over the past decade. Suns too. None of those teams were contenders this year. |
The WC has been historically strong over the past few years, just as the WC was historically weak in the '80s. That affects the ELO ratings. It isn't a function of specific teams, but rather a function of quality of overall competition. We talk about the difference in quality between the EC and WC all the time. This year, the Warriors dominated an historically strong conference. You would expect the ELO ratings to reflect this, and they do.
The ELO ratings don't purport to tell you that Team A from Season X would have beaten Team B from Season Y. There are too many other changes in the game to make that analysis. Instead, the ratings tell you how a franchise rated against its competition over time. Thus the '09 Lakers rate slightly higher than the threepeat Lakers or the '80s Lakers relative to their competition at the time, not relative to each other.
As I said in the other thread on this subject, the ELO ratings are an interesting conversation piece and a reminder that the '09 team really was something special. We won 65 games and finished first in the conference by 11 games, in a year in which it took 48 wins just to make the playoffs in the West. That team ranks 11 ELO points higher than the '01 team, which had a great playoff run but won only 56 regular season games. Is that a meaningful difference? Really no. |
The 12' Heat rank pretty high despite playing in an EC that routinely features 2 or 3 playoff teams with 41 wins or fewer. Was their margin of victory just so great that it compensated for such a garbage conference? |
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Aeneas Hunter
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Joined: 12 Jul 2005
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| Posted: Thu May 28, 2015 6:01 am Post subject: |
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| vanexelent wrote: | | The 12' Heat rank pretty high despite playing in an EC that routinely features 2 or 3 playoff teams with 41 wins or fewer. Was their margin of victory just so great that it compensated for such a garbage conference? |
It was the '13 Heat that hit the max for those teams at 1774, with a record of 75-17 (they finished at 1754). By comparison, the Warriors peaked this year at 1813 with a record of 78-17 (they are at 1802 now). So the ELO ratings generate a 40-50 point difference between the '15 Warriors and the '13 Heat, even though the records are comparable. I don't have the underlying numbers, but I would assume that most of the disparity is due to strength of opponents.
You mentioned the '12 Heat. They finished at 1712, and their high water mark was 1729 earlier in the season when their record hit 38-7. |
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