Current Major Contenders and Finals Projections Going Into the 2011 Playoffs
This post is a week late since it should have been posted just before the 2011 playoffs began. It's much better a little late then never. What's to blame? The usual: a lot of other work and way too much babysitting of the IRS and of other organizations which are proving themselves to be very disturbingly incompetent lately. It's not only George Karl who is in way over his head, laugh out loud.
Aside from free form reporting in text Reports, Quest for the Ring (QFTR) has three types of formatted Reports it ueses to convey to the public who the best teams in pro basketball are. The three are (1) Real Team Ratings, (2) Current Major Contenders and Finals Projections, and (3) the Main QFTR Banner that you see at the top when you visit QFTR. Here is what you get with each look at the best basketball teams:
REAL TEAM RATINGS
This is the heavy duty "king of the hill" team rating system which employs state of the art knowledge and technology to reveal how all 30 pro NBA teams stack up with respect to how well they will most likely do in playoff games. These ratings are supposed to come out about once a month during the regular season starting at the end of December. Despite heavy pressure on our time, QFTR was able to produce a Real Team Ratings (RTR) Report not long before the 2011 playoffs started, on March 26 to be exact. Technically, a RTR Report should be produced when the regular season is completely over. Within the next month (two months?) QFTR will probably produce a final end of regular season Real Team Ratings Report for 2011 (late as usual laugh out loud).
CURRENT MAJOR CONTENDERS AND FINALS PROJECTIONS
This type of Report consists of two primary components: the breakdown of the top contenders and the finals projections.
For the breakdown of top contenders, the top five teams in each conference are identified and broken down based primarily on Real Team Ratings but also on QFTR knowledge about factors that can not possibly be fully reflected in the RTR system.
These other impossible to accurately quantify "wild card" factors in order of importance are:
--Injuries
--Coaching, especially how some coaching works better in the playoffs than in the regular season and vice versa
--QFTR expectations about how some players will play better or worse in the playoffs as compared to the regular season
So "Current Major Contenders" is where QFTR takes the Real Team Ratings as a base and makes a few changes based on high level knowledge that can not (yet anyway) be part of the RTR system.
The other component to "Current Major Contenders and Finals Projections" is, you guessed it, finals projections. What a surprise!
In general QFTR does not predict specific playoff series; see below for some reasons we don't. But QFTR does project Conference and NBA Finals results throughout both the regular season and the playoffs, often long before it is even known for sure which teams will be in those finals. We do so only with disclaimers. We certainly don't "guarantee" our projections for the reasons listed above and discussed in some detail below and nor will be issuing any apologies if we are wrong unless we were wrong due to our own faulty knowledge.
"THE SITUATION" TYPE REPORTS
This is simply a Current Major Contenders and Finals Projections Report where open commentary is added after the breakdowns and the projections. So this type of Report has a formatted section and a non-formatted section; it is a hybrid. In general "Situation Reports" are among the most useful and informative Reports that QFTR ever does; try not to miss any of them. QFTR will try its best to produce more of these in the future. But unfortunately, due to ever present production time limitations and due to the many types of Reports QFTR produces, Situation Reports are going to probably be like gold: hard to find but very valuable when you do see one.
THE MAIN QFTR BANNER
Sometime within the next few months QFTR will produce a new User Guide that will explain exactly how we produce the QFTR Main Banner. Some details will be left to that Guide but here is a quick summary right here and now.
On the banner there are three team logos and/or team flags in two columns. The column on the left is for the West Conference and the column on the right is for the East Conference.
There are two "sets of rules" for the banner, one set in effect starting in December or at the latest on January 1 each year and running until the Championship is completed in June and the other set of rules running from that time in June until sometime in December.
DECEMBER-JUNE BANNER
During this time of the year, the two teams on the top of the two conference columns are the two that QFTR thinks are most likely to reach the Championship coming up in June. The teams just below those are the two teams most likely to take their place if the top team loses out due to one or more injuries or due to unexpected bad coaching or due to unexpected bad player performance. And then the third teams in each column are the ones which have the best chance of reaching the Championship should both of the teams above them falter in one of the ways just described.
Between December and June this "projection banner" can be changed at any time but we generally don't change it more than once a month at the most during the regular season. But after certain playoff upsets there may be an immediate need for a quick emergency banner change!
Sometimes we simply can't change the banner exactly when we want to because we can't come up with the time to do so. For example, we finally had the time to make a banner change on April 18, 2011 that we wanted to make back around April 1. The Chicago Bulls overtook the Boston Celtics as the most likely East Champion due to the bad trade Boston made on the one hand and due to the historic superstar point guard performance of Derrick Rose (of the Bulls) and the extremely strong defending of the Chicago Bulls on the other hand.
JUNE-DECEMBER BANNER
In June when the Championship is over the banner changes from predicting the upcoming Championship to reflecting the actual results of it. Since there are no projections to change, this banner is locked in until December. That is, the banner that runs between late June and sometime in December reflects what actually happened and so it does not change (unless there is a graphical redesign). For this banner, the actual Conference Champions (who met in the Championship) are at the top. Under them are the two teams that reached the Conference Finals but lost there. On the third row, for each Conference, QFTR uses it's knowledge, data, and judgment to choose the better among the two teams which won a playoff series in round one but lost in round two (the semifinals). (There are always going to be exactly two teams in each conference and four in total which win a first round series and then lose in the second round.)
Note that teams that lose in the first round can not possibly appear on the June-December banner. At the opposite extreme, all four teams which won two playoff series and that reached the Conference Finals automatically appear in the top two rows. Among the four teams which won one and only one playoff series (two in each conference) two of them appear on the bottom row. Overall, six of the sixteen teams that made it into the playoffs will show on the banner.
Aside from perhaps going over the above in slightly more detail, the complete "User Guide to the QFTR Banner" will explain how we determine which players and coaches appear on the banner.
Now that you are familiar with the three ways that QFTR informs the public about which are the best pro basketball teams, here is the final "Current Major Contenders" for the 2010-11 season. In other words, here is how the top five teams of each conference stacked up going into the 2011 playoffs. If you click a team you will visit a page which gives you a great summary of who is doing what on that team. (But sorry, you won't find Real Player Ratings there; stay tuned for those to appear at QFTR as always).
CURRENT MAJOR CONTENDERS as of April 11, 2011
THE EAST
Main Primary Contender: Chicago Bulls
Alternate Primary Contender: Boston Celtics
Wild Card: Miami Heat
Big Long Shot: Orlando Magic
Extreme Long Shot: Philadelphia 76'ers
THE WEST
Main Primary Contender: Los Angeles Lakers
Alternate Primary Contender: San Antonio Spurs
Wild Card: Oklahoma Thunder
Big Long Shot: Dallas Mavericks
Extreme Long Shot: New Orleans Hornets
CONFERENCE AND LEAGUE FINALS PROJECTIONS AS OF APRIL 11, 2011
2011 NBA EAST FINAL
Chicago Bulls over Boston Celtics 4-2
2011 NBA WEST FINAL
Los Angeles Lakers over San Antonio Spurs 4-2
2011 NBA CHAMPIONSHIP
Los Angeles Lakers over Chicago Bulls 4-3
Remember, both the Current Major Contenders and the Finals Projections will be wrong if any of the following happen. These three "wild card" factors are listed in order of likelihood:
--One or more significant injuries not already known about as of the date of this posting
--Bad or good coaching not already known about as of the date of this posting
--Unexpected player performances not already anticipated
Based on extensive QFTR custom data and research, playoff upsets occur as follows:
--Total of all Upsets: 24.6% of all playoff games and series are upsets
--Upsets Due to Injuries: 48.7% of all upsets which is 12.0% of all playoff games and series
--Upsets Due to Coaching: 35.1% of all upsets which is 8.6% of all playoff games and series
--Upsets Due to Players: 16.2% of all upsets which is 4.0% of all playoff games and series.
Always remember that the Current Major Contenders breakdown and the Finals projections are based on everything known including all KNOWN injuries, all KNOWN coaching factors, and any anticipated player performance surprises strongly expected to come true. Unknown injuries, unknown coaching factors, and/or unknown/unexpected player performance factors will cause the breakdown and the projections to be wrong.
Other than predicting the Conference Finals and the Championship with the disclaimers just made, QFTR intentionally does NOT publicly attempt to predict the outcome of all of the playoff series even though, if we did, we would be able to "show off" by predicting some (but not all) of the upsets. We intentionally choose not to use our "power" in this way because there is actually little to be gained in doing so and because the last thing we want to do is attract people who bet money on basketball games to QFTR. We are already fairly inundated with the wrong people coming to QFTR, thank you very much Google. (But at least Google is attracting people in general to QFTR. Now they just have to work on getting the RIGHT people to QFTR!)
While if we predicted all of the playoff series QFTR would generally be more accurate than anyone else, we would still be wrong about series where any of the three factors previously described go into effect. It would be juvenile to "show off" by publicly correctly predicting an upset or two every year which, however, we could do if we wanted to. We do privately predict most or all of the series and yes, it's true, we do correctly predict some of the playoff upsets.
Having said all of that, QFTR will from time to time not be able to avoid the temptation to predict a playoff series within a text Report. Text reports are where QFTR is free to report information about basketball to you without being subject to any specific format. Most new ground is broken in text reports and if we had the right people coming to QFTR they would be reading those reports at least as often as looking at the formatted and statistical reporting. By contrast, this Report is a formatted Report where the objective and the format are pre-programmed. QFTR can not "go off the reservation" in a formatted Report.
Similarly, when playoff series are over, QFTR will sometimes in a text Report boast about how it privately predicted a playoff series upset.
Always remember that those who read QFTR text Reports are always rewarded with information you can't get in any of the QFTR formatted Reports.
Never bet money on basketball games due to the unpredictability of factors described above.