Playoff Seed Projections

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boooeee
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Playoff Seed Projections

Post by boooeee »

I've added projections of each team's playoff/lottery seeding to my daily rankings table. Here is the table, and here is the explanatory post. As far as I know, playoff projections at this level of detail are not publicly available.

The overall approach is similar to Hollinger's playoff projections, except I'm using my team rankings (naturally) as opposed to his to simulate future games.

This was largely an excuse to play around with some data visualization techniques (see here for the Lakers' playoff seed distribution). However, my next step is to hopefully add in a "leverage index" for each game that calculates the potential swing in playoff probability attributable to that game's outcome. This can then be published daily each morning as an objective measure of what the "important" games are for that day. I could potentially also use the index to systematically investigate how team performance and team stats varies under high and low leverage games.
Crow
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Re: Playoff Seed Projections

Post by Crow »

Lakers are the only team not currently playoff seeded with above a 10% chance to slip in according to your work. But the league will play almost 500 more games in the league to decide that last spot (and a real long shot for a second) and of course the exact order / pairings / home courts.
deepak
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Re: Playoff Seed Projections

Post by deepak »

boooeee wrote:I've added projections of each team's playoff/lottery seeding to my daily rankings table. Here is the table, and here is the explanatory post. As far as I know, playoff projections at this level of detail are not publicly available.
Can oGPF and dGPF be interpreted as schedule-adjusted offensive and defensive ratings that aren't pace-adjusted?
v-zero
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Re: Playoff Seed Projections

Post by v-zero »

For comparison TeamRankings has such projections also.
boooeee
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Re: Playoff Seed Projections

Post by boooeee »

Crow wrote:Lakers are the only team not currently playoff seeded with above a 10% chance to slip in according to your work. But the league will play almost 500 more games in the league to decide that last spot (and a real long shot for a second) and of course the exact order / pairings / home courts.
That was surprising. Team Rankings shows the same result (although they have the Lakers at 25% compared to my 19%). As noted in the blog post, Hollinger's probabilities have more spread to them, with the Raptors, 76ers, and Mavericks all at a >10% chance.
boooeee
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Re: Playoff Seed Projections

Post by boooeee »

deepak wrote:
boooeee wrote:I've added projections of each team's playoff/lottery seeding to my daily rankings table. Here is the table, and here is the explanatory post. As far as I know, playoff projections at this level of detail are not publicly available.
Can oGPF and dGPF be interpreted as schedule-adjusted offensive and defensive ratings that aren't pace-adjusted?
That's a good way to think of them. More specifically, they are what the market thinks are each team's true non-pace-adjusted offensive and defensive rankings. My rankings are essentially just the Simple Ranking System, but I'm using the point spreads and over/unders as my dependent variables, as opposed to actual game outcomes.

A high over/under for a given game could be function of pace or offensive/defensive efficiency (or both), but there's no way to decompose that just from the betting information.
boooeee
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Re: Playoff Seed Projections

Post by boooeee »

The Lakers' playoff seeding probabilities: in motion.
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