Each passing day brings about more information making the re-start of the NBA season seem less and less plausible. While this is news saddens me and many of my friends who love the sport, there is still an opportunity to analyze how this season has played out, how things look going forward, and some tweaks the league can make it to make the experience even more enjoyable.
Today I am going to do a breakdown of my preseason over/under’s both for entertainment purposes and as a part of the process to figure out what I got right and wrong as I do this exercise again in the future. Since the season obviously hasn’t finished I’m going to assign each pick a 0, 25, 50, 75, or 100% chance of happening and see how things play out from there. I am using a combination of 538’s Raptor, Kosta Mevdevovsky’s DARKO, and the teams current win percentage with a little bit of intuition to try and figure out how likely each team was to hit their preseason win totals.
I’ll start with my least confident picks and work my way up
Decent Plays I would make
12. Minnesota Over 35.5
Whoops….Not a good start here. O%
11. Oklahoma City over 32
If I had known they would’ve gotten off to a better than expected start and not moved anyone at the deadline this might have been my #1 play. 100%
10. Utah under 53.5
This is the first one where it’s hard to say if it’s more of a 50% chance or 75%. They’d have to go 1-5 the rest of the season which is certainly doable, but less likely than not. All systems have them as 51 or 51.5 win team. They might have more to play for with seeding, but even factoring that in I’m calling this a 75% play.
9. Chicago over 32.5
Coaching matters folks. Jim Boylen clearly isn’t cut out for this. 0%
8. New Orleans over 37.5
This would’ve been one of the 2 nail-biters for me coming down the stretch. On one hand, the Pelicans are on pace for well less than this total. On the other hand, they would have had the easiest schedule in the league going forward, and you may have heard that they had a guy named Zion Williamson coming back from injury. Both RAPTOR and DARKO had them narrowly edging it out, but not with enough confidence for me to call this more than a 50% chance
7. Lakers under 51.5
Don’t take Lebron James for granted folks. Don’t underestimate him like fools like me do 😦 0%
6. Charlotte over 23.5
It certainly has not been the sexiest of paths, but the Hornets are 1 win from clinching. I’ll take my wins no matter how ugly they are 100%
Close to Locks
5. Dallas over 40.5
Much better start to this round. We can safely assume that Dallas isn’t going 0-15 to end the season 100%
4. Detroit under 37.5
Oooph! I was obviously low on the Pistons, but not even I saw them being bottom 5 overall team in the league bad 100%
3. Philly under 54.5
I said it before the season and Ill say it again. This team didn’t win this many games last year, nor did their point differential indicate they should have. If that weren’t enough THEY GOT RID OF THEIR BEST PLAYER!!! It never made any sense 100%
2. Phoenix over 29.5
This was one that was kind of hard to figure where to place. They just had to go 4-13 to end the season which they clearly would be favored to. Still it’s plausible they lose a couple close games and decide to tank the rest of the season when it becomes clear they can’t make the playoffs and wind up just missing their over. I’d say the odds of something like that happen are between a quarter and 0 percent of the time. Ultimately I’m calling it 75%
Lock for the season
- Indiana under 47.5
Gulp! They’re on pace for 49 wins, but their schedule is getting harder. Darko and 538 both have them between 48 and 48.5 wins. I’d say I’m an underdog on this one, but a very slight one. This is one that very likely could’ve come down to whether or not they were fighting for seeding or more in the mood to rest for the impending playoffs. We’ll never find out, but I’m calling it a coin flip 50%
Conclusion
Add it all up and you get a projected record of: 7.5-4.5
That’s a pretty good year for me. 7-5 is what what my expected record would be, anything more is good, anything less bad. There’s a reason there aren’t too many people that consistently beat Vegas, it’s not easy. I didn’t do particularly well with the first group, but those teams were all in my 55-60% confidence interval. It’s possible that I would’ve gotten a clear 6-0 sweep of my top picks if everything would’ve broken correctly, and those are the ones that were more important to me. I would’ve bet more heavily on them had I been wagering.
Based off projected records the Oklahoma City over and Detroit under would have been the second and third best preseason bets one could’ve made (behind only Golden State’s under of 48.5). Memphis over at 26 would have been #4 and that was the last play to make it off my list of “Plays I would make”. The Lakers’ over coming it #6 is the only major blemish when looking at teams that went +/- 10 games from their projected records on Bovada.
Indiana is a team I want to do a deeper dive on. I thought losing 4 of their 5 starters would’ve had a bigger impact on the team than it did.
Thoughts?
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