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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