NBA - Written by jeff on Sunday, May 31, 2009 3:59 - 5 Comments
The NBA Playoffs
Have you ever wondered whether or not the best team wins a seven game series? Well Leonard Mlodinow, author of The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, shed some light on this topic during a lecture he gave at Google. If you want to skip to the bit about sports its at 13:50.
According to Mlodinow,
“A seven game series does not tell you much, there is a 40% chance that the lesser team will win.”
He went on to say, if we wanted to turn sports into a science and see a statistical significance for the best team winning, meaning the best team would win 95% of the time, then the series would have to be much longer. How much longer? To be much more confident in a series winner, a series would have to be 269 games long…roughly 3.2 full nba seasons!
Obviously a 269 game series is not realistic, so what can we take away? His calculations show that luck and chance play a large role in the outcome of a seven game series.
5 Comments
Leroy Jenkins
LoJiQ
yes… both lakers and magic just got lucky… they really suck.
Tbonez
LojiQ, I believe the article is more about what MATH has to say about the lesser team winning and less about what teams actually got lucky. Pretty simple concept. I would say the lakers were the best team in the west and the cabs were the best team in the east. So the magic probably got lucky.
jeff
looks like the magic got lucky after all.
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LOL 269 game series? I had a feeling that the magic weren’t that good.
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