While the stars take up all the spotlight, one overlooked factor will likely be the very thing that decides the NBA Championship. Phil Jackson vs game 1.

Jackson has had tremendous success in the NBA Playoffs. He is currently tied with the legendary Red Auerbach for the most championships. What is the secret to Phil Jackson’s playoff success?

Phil Jackson holds a 43-0 record when winning game 1 of a playoff series. Through all the years he’s coached the Chicago Bulls and the Los Angeles Lakers, he has never lost a series in which he has won the first game. So what does that tell us?  Phil Jackson winning game 1 won’t neccessarily guarantee a championship for the Lakers, but his 43-0 record clearly shifts the probability in favor of the Lakers.

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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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