Bucks Diary

Tuesday, January 06, 2009

THIS BLOG HAS MOVED TO: mvn.com/bucksdiary

All new writing on this blog is being posted at http://courtsideanalyst.wordpress.com/. Click on the link to be immediately redirected. Thank you for your interest in the NBA and Milwaukee Bucks basketball. (note: it was on MVN.com for a time, until they went belly up. Its now called "The Courtside Analyst" but features the same subject matter -- Bucks basketball first and then general NBA analysis -- and the same approach)

Friday, January 02, 2009

The Commenters excellent warning


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.

I accidentally blew up the new Bucksdiary


Remember I said not to be alarmed if anything strange happened at the new mvn.com/bucksdiary? Well, something strange happened.

Through a simple mistake compounded by a "don't push that button" attempt to backtrack and restore the blog, I appear to have destroyed it.

So, while the guys at MVN.com hopefully will restore it to what it was, I'm going to post everything back here again.

Maybe they won't have any interest in restoring it. Who knows. All i wanted to do was install a statcounter.

Yeah, that didn't work.

Ty