The Infamous January 14, 2009 Report and How the "Darth Vader" of Basketball Almost Succeeded at Destroying Quest for the Ring Because of it

There have been a total of about 550 Quest for the Ring Reports, roughly 370 of which contain information about basketball that I contend is all factually correct and the other 180 being mostly pre-formatted performance reports and entertainment. Of the roughly 370 Reports that describe basketball in exact detail and explain in detail how games are won and lost, especially playoff games, just one of them has been declared as incorrect subsequent to publication.

I am about to go over with a magnifying glass everything that was claimed in the Report that was in error noting what was correct but especially concentrating on what was incorrect and why. The objectives will be:

1. To satisfy my urge for and my tradition of perfection.
2. To hopefully prevent any additional errors in the future.
3. To explain how the errors in the Report occurred.
4. To explain what has been learned about playoff pro basketball as a result of reviewing the incorrect Report in detail, especially the errors.

Number 4 is the most important objective as you might expect.

The report that contained a few errors was published on January 14, 2009, and it was supposed to have been one of the most important Reports of the year. (It backfired.) The year, in turn, which was the third year, was supposed to be the most important of the three years to date. So the blunders in this Report were and are truly serious, and correcting them is more or less mandatory.

We have actually already set the record straight about many of the details associated with the Report in error in various other articles that came out during the summer and fall, but there are still the necessities of making sure we have corrected all of the errors, of having a mea culpa in one place, and of summarizing one final time what the 2009 Nuggets taught us.

Please don’t ever think that Quest for the Ring is perfect. But do think that unlike other sites, many of which don’t get upset about errors and/or don’t even notice they have made errors, Quest does continually monitor for errors and always corrects all errors other than trivial ones.

ABOUT PREDICTIONS
Most writers who cover the whole NBA make a lot of predictions about who is going to win what. Many have detailed preseason predictions. But they are doing so as much for fun and entertainment as for any serious reasons. The prediction writers not only do not issue anything close to a guarantee that they are correct, they often sort of joke about how they were wrong when the results are in.

Whereas my January 2009 prediction that the Nuggets would not win a playoff series was supposed to be very close to a guarantee, with the only out being a major unexpected injury to one or more players on the team the Nuggets were to play. But as if to emphasize how wrong that Report was, I was so charged up (and over confident?) at the time that I did not even mention at the time how an injury or two could completely invalidate my "guarantee" in the Report in question.

The whole approach was in 20/20 hindsight nothing short of asinine. Because what I should have done is simply list the same points why the Nuggets would most likely get smoked exactly as I did, but make the main point that these were reasons why the Nuggets would lose in the playoffs if enough of them occurred instead of going too far and claiming that some of them would definitely occur and that the Nuggets would definitely lose. I made the Report too strong and my nose was cut off as a result; I learned my lesson the hard way.

The Nuggets defeated the Hornets and the Mavericks in the 2009 playoffs. The Hornets were banged up from one end of their lineup to the other and they had no chance to beat anyone in the condition they were in. The prediction that the Nuggets would lose in the playoffs was technically invalid with respect to the Hornets series, although you would not know it given the glaring omission about injuries. That omission alone was enough to make that Report asinine. I was definitely not on my game when I wrote that one!

But the Mavericks were much less banged up, with only Josh Howard injured to any extent, and even he played in about three games of the series. The Josh Howard situation was not supposed to be enough to make my prediction invalid, so that prediction became officially and totally wrong when the Mavericks lost to the Nuggets. Ouch, the perfectionist was very wrong on something.

There is a good amount of entertainment on Quest, but it’s mostly non-basketball fun and frivolity. Quest is very serious about explaining how pro playoff basketball games are won, so any prediction we do, like most everything else we do, is supposed to be correct and is supposed to be in conjunction with explaining how games are won. In other words, as one of the very most serious basketball sites on the Internet, we don’t do predictions for entertainment, only for informational purposes.

So when on January 14, 2009 we predicted that the Denver Nuggets would “most likely not win a single playoff series” in the 2009 playoffs, this was supposed to be an accurate prediction, especially since as already mentioned the Report was supposed to be one of the more important Reports in the history of the site.

The Nuggets won two playoff series, and even appeared to be competitive in the 2009 West Final versus the Los Angeles Lakers, at least up until the point they were humiliated at home by the Lakers and thereby eliminated 4 games to 2.

Since I was so wrong, I have resolved to never make predictions unless I am about 99% certain. In January, I was about 90% certain that the Nuggets would fail to win a playoff series in 2009. The number of predictions I will be making will be carefully limited to those that are considered total locks.

There are too many variables to be predicting exactly who is going to beat who in the playoffs, especially many months in advance, injuries being by far the biggest one among many wild card variables. I don’t have to be making predictions to succeed at my objective of explaining exactly how playoff games are won. Although in theory, assuming what I teach is correct, I could predict who will beat who better than anyone who doesn’t do what I do, in practice it doesn’t make sense for me to do that, because I don’t have to be perfect or even close to perfect in predicting series to achieve what my real objectives are.

But to illustrate that I will still be making predictions when I am at least about 99% certain, which will probably be more often than you think, I have already this season predicted (with a "guarantee") that the Nuggets, despite being chock loaded with talent and very possibly more talented than the Lakers, will not win the 2010 NBA Championship. There is less than a 1% chance that they could defeat both the Lakers and whoever the East winner is, probably the Celtics. If any starter or very important bench player is out, though, that and all such predictions are invalid.

Due to the new restriction on me predicting things, I have refused to officially predict that the Nuggets will not beat the Lakers and win the West, but I will tell you that I am about 97% certain that they will not. The Nuggets have too much offensive talent for me to be 99% or more certain that the Nuggets will lose to the Lakers.

Aside from a few predictions that are intended and believed to be very close to locks, I will also be making conditional predictions via Real Team Ratings. But these “predictions” will not be the kind of serious, “I know for certain” kind of prediction that I in a blunder made in the January 14 Report. Quest for the Ring Real Team Ratings are designed to predict who the best playoff teams are. But the rankings resulting from the Ratings are not certain, hard and fast predictions of who is going to beat who. Real Team Ratings is a probabilistic model. It will most often be correct but it won’t always be correct. So you might call the predictions resulting from Real Team Ratings to be soft predictions.

Finally, it should be noted that although Quest does not have preseason predictions per se, we do have our probabilistic scheme separate from Real Team Ratings. You have probably seen it already. There are three groups of teams: major contenders, wild card contenders, and long shot contenders. Each of these groups consists of three teams. Using the beginning of the season breakdown, one of the major contenders will win the ring about 94% of all years, with one of the wild card contenders winning it in about 5% of all years, and one of the long shot contenders winning it in about 1% of all yers. A long shot contender has only about one third of one percent chance of winning the ring: about 1/333 chance.

HOW THE BATTLE FOR QUEST WAS WON: THE FORCE DEFEATS DARTH VADER
Before the Internet, secrets such as the ones I am about to reveal were almost always kept secret. In the Internet age, it is more common for secrets like this to be revealed, although only certain writers will be completely honest with you even now. My view is that since many secrets are busted on the Internet, and since writing posted on the Internet is commonly, unlike old fashioned writing, supposed to be entirely honest, there was no way I was going to keep this or anything else secret from you. You get everything I can give you with respect to how the Rings and the games are won and lost, including the details about occasional errors along the way.

So now I reveal what smug, snobbish, or uncaring writers would never reveal:

Had the Denver Nuggets won the 2009 NBA Championship, I almost certainly would have discontinued writing the story of how pro playoff games are won. Similarly, if the Denver Nuggets had defeated the Lakers but lost the NBA Championship, I most likely would have discontinued Quest for the Ring. In either of these scenarios, I would have been grossly wrong in what I have been teaching about how pro playoff games are won.

When a perfectionist is wrong, it’s bad enough, but if and when a perfectionist is grossly wrong, there is serious hell to pay. Massive reorganization and/or quitting the game are necessary when a perfectionist is grossly wrong. Reorganization was not an option because I had already and recently established a close to perfect editorial organization. So quitting due to incompetence was the only real option for a perfectionist had the Nuggets won the Ring or even just the West final.

So due to all of the Nuggets lucky breaks, but also due to the fact that I really was wrong to some extent regarding the 2009 Nuggets, I came dangerously close to having to discontinue the project due to having been proven hopelessly wrong.

KOBE BRYANT AND PHIL JACKSON TO THE RESCUE
But the Lakers, especially Kobe Bryant and Phil Jackson, saved me from this fate, by winning the series by using ways that I have been teaching are among the best ways to do it. Whereas the Nuggets got hammered 119-92 in an elimination game at home, a humiliation actually. The Nuggets were utterly destroyed in that game six, although they foolishly refused to interpret that rout in that way and vowed to make another attempt to beat the Lakers in 2010 without making any major changes in how they attempt that.

The Lakers eventually rose up out of the box the Nuggets were trying to keep them in and won big because they were and stayed true to basketball and the Nuggets persisted with trying to twist basketball into something it is not. George Karl and the Nuggets were claiming that basketball offense can be automatically reduced or limited via high fouling on defense and that fast pace on offense is a strategy that by itself can win a championship. The Nuggets’ claims were eventually proved to be very, very wrong,

But it took so long for the Nuggets to implode that it was hell on earth for a few weeks when the very existence of the Quest for the Ring project and site appeared to be in jeopardy. I mean, it was never actually in jeopardy, but you didn’t know that for sure at the time if you tend to worry too much like I do. Between all of the Nuggets’ luck and all of their offensive and defensive skill that got them into the West final, and between how long it took the Lakers to finally realize that “the force was with them,” it was a miserable experience.

The Darth Vader of basketball, George Karl, had succeeded in pulling the wool over people’s eyes more so than at any time before, to the point where there appeared to be a real threat to the Lakers, to Quest for the Ring, and to basketball.

All those around the country who had jumped on the 2009 Nuggets bandwagon as they won ten playoff games (everyone likes to root for the underdog sometimes) were surprised, to say the least, when the Nuggets imploded in game six. But notice that very few of those fly by night Nuggets fans around the country owned up to their mistake of predicting that the Nuggets were going to defeat the Lakers. They just went on their merry way. By contrast, even though I eventually "won," because months earlier I strongly predicted that the Nuggets would never get to play the Lakers in the West final, it is my duty to correct the specific things I was wrong about and to make sure that I don’t fall into the prediction trap in the future.

As you probably know and as mentioned already, the Lakers defeated the Nuggets 4 games to 2 in the 2009 West final. Had the Denver Nuggets won three games in the Lakers series, had the series gone to seven games in other words, there is about a 50/50 chance that I would have discontinued Quest. In this scenario I would have been substantially more wrong than I was, and also a secondary prediction I made about 10 days before the series began, that the Nuggets would not win more than one game against the Lakers despite having won two series (versus the Hornets and the Mavericks) would have been substantially more wrong.

So in the end, I was just wrong enough to have been very wrong, but not wrong enough to be “grossly wrong”. I came dangerously close to ending Quest for the Ring, not only due to being grossly wrong, but also because basketball would be a much less interesting and worthwhile game than I know it is had the Nuggets defeated the Lakers. If basketball could be won by using a football type of approach as Karl and the Nuggets were contending, hell, I'll start doing football.

As I said already in other Reports, the Nuggets and George Karl in the 2009 playoffs were like the Darth Vader of basketball, whereas Kobe, Phil, and the Lakers were the positive team reflecting the soul of basketball that had “the force” with them. And thank goodness that the force was in fact with the Lakers: how else can you explain them winning by 27 points in Denver in the elimination game on May 29? If that game was not “the force” showing itself, then what the hell else was it: the Nuggets losing on purpose?

The perfectionist thing to do in this case is to work like hell to figure out why I was wrong, and put in whatever safeguards possible to make sure that an error on the scale of the January 14 Report does not happen again. Actually, I have already explained exactly how the Nuggets won two playoff series in 2009: there is a series of Reports that you can check out for both the Nuggets-Hornets series and the Nuggets-Mavericks series.

As previously stated, I am next going back to the sixteen reasons in the January 14 Report that were given for the hard prediction that the Nuggets were going to lose out in the playoffs. We'll see which ones of those came true and why. We’ll review some of the main reasons why the Mavericks could not defeat the Nuggets. See the next two reports for that very important review. There is a lot of valuable information about how the Quest is won in there.

THE DARTH VADER OF BASKETBALL