Until tonight, everyone's still undefeated
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Long-rumored...but with hours to spare, here's our NBA preview special. Because, you know, the world needed another one.Hey there, wayward readers! Welcome to We Rite Goode's high-concept, low-rent NBA preview, where we'll...
....wait, wait. Hold on. Not only does the season tip off tonight, there already are a gazillion, top-notch NBA previews to choose from. Tom Ziller offers the appealing, non-denominational Festivus series on Ballhype. Celtic Blog's Jeff Clark corralled an entire league's worth of bloggers to post about their favorite teams. Even our hometown heroes, Prada and Jake at Bullets Forever, have done due diligence on the Wizards while offering "competition discussions" to take the league's pulse. The list goes on and on and on, with wrinkles galore. Most likely previews! Individual player previews!! Previews by players!!! A preview so hyperlinked it folds back in on itself!!!!
You get it. It's a crowded space. So why us? What made us think we can actually add value to the mix?
Two words.
John Hollinger.
As usual, it all starts with him.
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We got to wondering, when ESPN's Hollinger started taking flack this month over NBA predictions that we'll charitably describe as "counterintuitive" and others call "$%$ing awful." The Raptors...slipping out of the playoffs? The Nets...falling behind the Hawks and Magic? The Clippers...winning only 20 games!?
Save Houston fans--basking in Hollinger's prediction of a title--many others were grinding their axes, or at least asking Yahoo! if it was OK to get angry.
But here's the thing about Hollinger. Unlike many, many bloggers (excluding most of the ones mentioned above), he accounts for competition.
It should go without saying, but predictions can't be made in a vacuum. If a blogger forecasts one team winning 10 more games than last year, he needs to understand that the rest of the league collectively loses those 10 (and a true forecast would account for scheduling quirks, too). Say a blogger predicts the Wizards to win 55 games, up from 41...well, who's falling behind them in the East? And didn't Boston, Orlando, Atlanta, and other Eastern teams improve more in the off-season? Looking at the Celtics Blog-organized previews--which are wonderfully comprehensive, entertaining reads, and offer all kinds of fan perspective--occasionally reveals this lack of scope. We knew something was fishy when the Seattle guy predicted 40 wins.
What makes Hollinger annoying is that he serves as a check on our optimism at exactly the wrong time. During preseason, as we're thinking of what could be, he keys on what never was; looking backward, Hollinger explains why some won-loss records are hollow and certain players had career years. And agree with his logic or not, Hollinger grounds his predictions in such granular, player-by-player reasoning, it's hard to ignore his argument. Thus, while we're dismayed by the forecast of a 33-49 Wizards' season, we at least understand his case.
(We'll also confess our bias here; regular readers know Hollinger carries WRG's stamp of approval, and Dan Steinberg points out that Hollinger wasn't that far off last year.)
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So, here's where we came in: We wondered if bloggers could independently exercise the same restraint, the same critical eye as Hollinger. In an early incarnation, we figured our NBA preview would focus on a brief experiment--ask 30 of the bloggers we most respected and trusted to predict their favorite team's season, submitting some brief comments as explanation.
We didn't explain this experimental aspect when we asked; meanwhile, in a credit to bloggers' kindness, our target participants near-unanimously agreed to help. As we collected data, the bloggers' responses all were kept blind of one another; moreover, we didn't encourage participants to focus solely on won-loss record, as we asked for that fact within the context of a larger survey.
Basically, no one knew to "temper" their predictions. For all intents and purposes, each participant wrote up a normal preview.
(Of course, the writing that we got back was so good, we decided to expand this preview. More on that all the way at the bottom.)
(And hopefully, none of these bloggers now hate us. Scout's honor, it was for a good cause! Marketplace of ideas, and all that.)
First, we wanted to know--what does your team need to do to make you happy? Here's what we learned, in what we'll call the "wishful thinking" scenario.
Yes, hope springs eternal in the preseason. (Note: We conducted these surveys pre-Ricky Davis trade, pre-Beno Udrih trade, and pre-Mark Cuban elimination from Dancing With the Stars. Just take that into consideration). According to our participants--ranging from dedicated NBA writers like Natalie Sitto and Marcel Mutoni to guys like the Big Picture's Zach ("I'm only a fan, not an expert" he assured us)--the average team would need to go 47-35 and a whopping 24 teams would make the playoffs in order to satisfy expectations. Only the esteemed bloggers representing Memphis, Minnesota, Philadelphia, Portland, Sacramento, and Seattle are OK with buying their teams lottery tickets in October. (You read right--every Eastern Conference blogger save one think his team's got a chance. It's that wide-open).
You'll notice that we scratched a few predictions out; this reflects three cases when participants weren't especially concerned with record. As you'll read in their write-ups, Jon of MVN/Passion & Pride wanted a win--just one!--for the 76ers, while Seth Kolloen of Enjoy the Enjoyment only asks for the Sonics to stay in Seattle. (Also, Liston Von Culbertson calls for an 82-0 season for the Spurs...but we felt obligated to exercise a bit of restraint.) In these cases, we turned to the Celtics Blog-previews and just subbed in the average record expected.
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But OK. That's the ideal scenario. Of course every fan dreams big...although, pending emergency playoff expansion, more than one-quarter of our participants are slated for disappointment. But we figured, true fans are grounded in reality--they've had to temper expectations before. So we also asked--forget the ideal scenario; what realistically is going to happen? And here's where it gets really interesting, folks.
Sure, there's still some distortion--the average team would go an impossible 43-39--but, the group now forecasts a near-perfect field of 17 playoff teams. The correct eight from the East, the unorthodox nine from the West. Seven bloggers weeded themselves out; only Carter Blanchard's wavering support for the Lakers keeps it from a proper playoffs.
So our conclusion: Bloggers tend toward slight optimism and inflation, but given the limitations of their information, being an average of just two games off (and picking a near-playoff field) was pretty impressive to us.
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And we could've stopped there...but the bloggers blew us away. Some wrote back in record time (Tom Ziller, Trey Jones) or offered to craft multiple previews (Ben Go). Others wrote reams, even when we asked for only a few lines of context (you know who you are). Clearly, we had a full-fledged preview on our hands, even if we weren't initially prepared to build one.
Thus, although it's not We Rite Goode's style, we'll update the site two-three times per day over this first week of the NBA, sharing with you all the witty quips and observations some of the best sports bloggers offered up to us, division by division. And we really feel like we've been given a great window to do so--we've totally cornered the NBA preview market for this week and next!
As a side bonus, we pulled some other insights from the surveys, and if there's time, will throw them up via other soul-crushing graphs and charts that only remind you of work and/or dreaded econ classes.
Wait. Graphs, charts, and pages of text?
Yes--we know our target audience.
Update: Links below as we upload division-by-division previews.
Southwest Division previewSoutheast Division previewPacific Division preview
Atlantic Division preview
Northwest Division preview
Central Division preview
Labels: experiment, NBA preview, raging optimism, surprisingly accurate grounding in reality
posted by Crucifictorious @ 04:35,
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