Seeing as how I Typhooned the mvn.com/bucksdiary... for now... I cannot give proper credit to an astute commenter a few posts back whose words of warning ought to give Bucksnation a little pause.
Remember my Win Trajectory post, written around Xmas or just days thereafter? In it I argued that the Bucks are on a 44 win pace this season, when you make adjustments to account for unbalanced schedule and home/road splits thus far. In the comments section, someone wrote that had I done the same calculations two years ago, the Bucks were probably I'd probably have gotten similar results.
I thought the commenter was right, but I lacked the information to verify, and I certainly wasn't going to go back in time and reconstruct the first two months of the 2006-07 NBA season. Then I thought of a shortcut. I remembered that Coolstandings.com, which has a win projection system not at all like mine but normally yielding close to the same results, keeps records going back several seasons. There projection would suffice.
Whoa. The commenter was eerily correct. The Bucks record two years to the date the commenter posted was 16-15, and they were on a slightly better pace. Coolstandings had them projected to win 45 games. Tip of the cap to the commenter.
Of course the bad news is the Bucks won only 10 more games the rest of the season and finished 26-56. Scary.
But, I think the factors that led to the collapse were by and large outside the realm of forecast... injuries devastated that team as I recall. And they may (knock, knock, knock) do the same to this team... who knows?
Another key difference that I think is worth noting is the 06-07 team was powered by offense, while this season's team is most certainly powered by defense. Defense is much steadier.
Nevertheless, thank the commenter's fine Milwaukee Bucks memory for a warning against early hubris.
