Friday, January 20, 2012

Good News, Bullets Blog Fans: The JPoint is Relevant

To be honest, the night I made the JPoint I was just looking for a numerical way to prove Kobe's overratedness. However, I was fairly unbiased and we've adjusted the JPoint calculation method slightly to reflect offensive efficiency. I meant it to be an individual thing, but in last night's post I expanded it to entire teams as an explanation of why the Heat won.

Well in class today I was thinking. What if offensive efficiency is the single most important determinant of the winner of an NBA? Sounds absurd right, because I mean it's only a part of the game - there's assists, rebounds, defense, steals, substitutions, momentum, and the occasional brawl between players and fans.

But chew on this: I crunched some numbers from the games yesterday (there were only 3 - a small sample size, for sure) and look at my findings:

Game 1: Houston Rockets 90, New Orleans Hornets 88 (Final/OT)
To summarize this game in one ESPN headline, "Rockets survive awful 4th to top Hornets in OT." The fact that neither team scored more than 90 points in 53 minutes of play should reiterate that. But if you were looking for a statistical measure of offensive effectiveness, I have just the thing (see where I'm going with this?):
Houston: 30.5 JPoint (that's horrendous, in relation to averages)
New Orleans: 28.2 JPoint (and that would be even worse)

For those of you keeping track, that's 1/1 on JPoint reflecting final score.



Game 2: Miami Heat 98, Los Angeles Lakers 87
I talked about this yesterday, so I'll just jump right into the numbers:
Miami: 36.4 JPoint (pretty damn good for an entire team)
Los Angeles: 31.5 


That makes 2/2.

Game 3: Dallas Mavericks 94, Utah Jazz 91
Two very different team styles here: the veteran Mavericks against the youthful Jazz. Which team was more effective at scoring the basketball?
Dallas: 36.3 JPoint (pretty damn good for an entire team)
Utah: 34.0 JPoint (about average)
Utah was hurt by their 3-12 showing from the 3-point line. Dallas didn't do much better (5-20), but they shot much better than Utah in general (0.521 compared to Utah's 0.388). And actually, the overall field goal percentage was a much larger factor in this game than anything else.

And that, my loyal readers, makes 3/3 for the night.

We'll see what happens in tonight's games - there are 11 of them.

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