crazy stat of the night

Check out last night's box score: Carmelo Anthony had 30 points on 13-22 shooting and zero free throw attempts. I'd be interested to know when the last time a player has scored 30 or more points with zero free throw attempts in the playoffs. If it has happened before I'm guessing there are very few occurences.

playoff suspensions

Check out these videos and see if you can see any consistency in some of Stu Jackson's decisions for NBA playoff fouls.

Robert Horry body checks Steve Nash into the scorer's table


Punishment: suspended 2 games (Amare and Diaw were each suspended for leaving the bench area).


Rajon Rondo throws Hinrich into the scorer's table then tries to elbow him in the head


Punishment: nothing


Kenyon Martin shoves Dirk Nowitzki


Punishment: $25,000 fine


Dwight Howard elbows Samuel Dalembert in the head


Punishment: suspended one game


Kobe Bryant elbows Ron Artest somewhere between his chest and throat


Punishment: Essentially nothing (upgraded to a flagrant 1)


Derek Fisher doing an NFL hit on Luis Scola


Punishment: Suspended one game


Rafer Alston slaps Eddie House in the back of the head


Punishment: Suspended one game


Rajon Rondo slaps Brad Miller in the face


Punishment: nothing


And most recently, Kendrick Perkins elbows Mickael Pietrus in the throat


Punishment: nothing


For the record, the Celtics are 3 for 3 on questionable plays reviewed by the league in this post season.

I wanted to look at the numbers to see if having a player that is suspended helps or hurts a team's chances of winning. This year the Magic won Game 6 vs Philadelphia when Howard was suspended and last night they won Game 3 vs Boston when Alston was suspended. The Lakers also won last night without Fisher. The Spurs won Games 5 and 6 when Robert Horry was suspended (although in Game 5 Phoenix didn't have Amare or Diaw due to suspension). I also remember Phoenix winning a Game 5 over the Lakers in 2006 after Raja Bell choke-slammed Kobe in Game 4. I haven't been able to find historical suspension data in the playoffs to fully investigate but it appears that no suspension for Perkins may be a bad thing for Boston.

winning games 1 and 2

I was reading this post over at thirdqquartercollapse.com (an Orlando Magic blog) and thought a statistic that erivera7 quoted was worth some additional analysis.

[W]hen an NBA team nets a 2-0 series lead, the series victory probability is
93.5% (203-14).

This got me wondering if it matters whether the winner of Games 1 and 2 have home court advantage (meaning they won Games 1 and 2 at home) or not (meaning they won Games 1 and 2 on the road), especially since both the Magic and Rockets are in that situation. It seems that a team would be more likely to win the series if they won Games 1 and 2 on the road than a team that won Games 1 and 2 at home. If you win on the road you have 3 out of the next 5 possible games at home whereas if you win games 1 and 2 at home only 2 out of the next 5 are at home.

Using data from best-of-7 series going back to 1977 and excluding the NBA Finals, I got roughly the same overall statistic as erivera7. Out of 147 series where a team has led 2-0, that team has won 138 times or 93.88% of the time. However, the team with home court advantage won the series 128 out of 135 times (94.81%) when leading 2-0 while the team without home court advantage won 10 out of 12 times (83.33%). Interestingly, the team with home court advantage appears to have a better chance of winning a series when up 2-0 than a team without home court advantage that also leads 2-0 even though they would have more home games left. However, this is not statistically significant as it results in a p-value of 0.336. For a review on proportion tests you can look at my earlier post here or you can use a proportion test calculator found here. Since there are very few times in history when a road team has won Games 1 and 2 it is likely that the difference observed is due to random chance. So if Orlando and/or Houston win tonight there's no evidence that Boston or LA have any better chance of winning their series than Dallas has of beating Denver.

overtime madness

The most talked about matchup so far has been the Boston/Chicago series. Four out of six of their games have gone to overtime, one of those went to double overtime, and the game last night went to triple overtime. To put it another way, out of 13 times that the buzzer has sounded at the end of an overtime period or at the end of a 4th quarter, 7 times the score has been tied.

To emphasize just how unlikely a series is to have 4 overtime games out of the first 6 played, I estimated the probability of any one game going to overtime using this year's regular season data. Since I couldn't easily find the total number of games that went to overtime, I estimated it by using team data and looking at total minutes, subtracting at the total number of minutes in regulation, then dividing by 5 to see how many overtime periods were played in total. The minute statistic is subject to rounding error and I ended up getting 81.76 overtime periods played in the regular season. I use this exact number because without additional information there's no way to know if the true number is really 82, 81, or some other number close to that. Our estimate for the probability of a game going to overtime is then the number of overtime periods divided by the total number of games played, or 81.76/1230 = 0.06647. This is most likely a high estimate since it's assuming that every overtime game had one overtime period, which is almost certainly false but is still a very close estimate. So if any one game has a 6.647% chance of going to overtime, the chances of 4 out of 6 games in a row going to overtime can be calculated using this equation:

(n!/((k!)*(n-k)!))*(p^k)*(1-p)^(n-k)

where:

n=the number of games (6)

k=the number of games that go into overtime (4)

p=the probability any one game goes into overtime (0.06647)

After plugging in the values we get the result of 0.00025518 or 0.025518%. Basically 2.5 times out of every 10,000 series that go at least 6 games will have 4 overtime games in the first 6 games played. If you add in the possibility of having 5 or 6 overtime games the result is only slightly higher at 0.00026254. Also, we can calculate the chances of out of 13 possible times to close out a game that 7 of those times end up tied. The value for p will change slightly since we are including overtime periods, so instead of 81.76/1230 we use 81.76/(1230+81.76) = 0.06233. The value for n changes to 13 and the value for k changes to 7. In this scenario the probability ends up being 0.00000426282 or 0.000426282%. Essentially, just over 4 times out of every 10 million. Again, if we add in the possibility of having more than 7 ties out of 13 attempts, the probability increases slightly to 0.00000448341.

As a result, I don't think we're going to see a series like this ever again.