NBA - Written by jeff on Sunday, May 31, 2009 3:59 - 5 Comments

The NBA Playoffs

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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.



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Leroy Jenkins
Jun 1, 2009 3:40

LOL 269 game series? I had a feeling that the magic weren’t that good.

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LoJiQ
Jun 12, 2009 6:21

yes… both lakers and magic just got lucky… they really suck.

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Tbonez
Jun 12, 2009 7:21

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.

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jeff
Jun 18, 2009 22:16

looks like the magic got lucky after all.

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Goyocadoiduko
Feb 9, 2010 20:51

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