Power Ranking

[Crow]

The first table here is a useful breakdown of team performance by time period:

http://wagesofwins.com/2012/02/28/the-h ... midseason/

Portland with the best performance over the last 6 games. Two great stretches separated by their worst performance period of the year.

M Tamada might want to look at the Celtics' performance in most recent time period. Wonder what Ainge is thinking and will do.

Chicago just average in 2 of the last 3 time periods.

Philly average or worse in 3 of the last 4.

LAC, PHX, IND, MIN, NJN and SAC at their best performance yet this last period.

[Jeff Fogle]

Spurs hurt badly in the recent math with their tank job at Portland. That was -40. They were at +6.5 in the other five games in the sample...and that whole sample was on the road because it's the annual rodeo trip. Final six games was more of a continuation of two stellar six-packs...with the tank job creating a whopping illusion. Median was 4.0 in that last sixpack, with nothing but road games...

[EvanZ]

Wheel of Fortune (or Failure) based on my Vegas ratings as of 2/28

[boooeee]

For those of you that are visual thinkers, I've added a feature to my rankings that charts any team's Betting Market ranking day to day. Makes the overall storyline of each team pretty apparent. There's also a second chart that tracks over/under (compared to the league average). The market's assumption on average points scored started off at around 192 points per game. It hit bottom at the end of January at 189, but has now crept back up to nearly 192 again.

The Ticker

I like the Wheel of Fortune visualization. Hadn't seen that before.

[EvanZ]

Cool stuff. The Bulls chart kind of surprised me.

[boooeee]

Cool stuff. The Bulls chart kind of surprised me.

Yeah. You can see they hit their high point on Feb. 10, right before Derrick Rose went out. But even with him back, and their recent win streak, they don't appear to have rebounded in my rankings. Part of the issue may be that my rankings still have some lag to them, as I need to pull in lines from the past three weeks in order to get enough "inter-connectedness".

I wouldn't be surprised to see them tick up over the next week. I've also considered using a two week average for the charts, instead of three weeks. It's more volatile, but should be more responsive to recent developments.

[Crow]

Any new techniques tried or interesting trends in the last month?

[Mike G]

According to Sagarin, 2/3 of teams are above average (90), with a smaller number of really bad teams.
At b-r.com, a similar story in SRS, with 17 teams >0.70, 3 more within 0.13 of zero, and just 10 teams worse than that.

Six of the 7 worst teams are in the East.

[Crow]

Last season there were 15 over 90.

This year only 5 over 93. Last season 10 and the same level for a couple other recent years.
Bad playoffs coming?
Only 5 in 2005-6 and Miami snuck up and grabbed the title, in part because the "top contenders" weren't that good.